Introducing Modrinth+, a refreshed site look, and a new advertising system!

We’ve got a big launch with tons of new stuff today and some important updates about Modrinth.  Read on, because we have a lot to cover!

Modrinth+

First off, we’re launching Modrinth+, a monthly subscription to help support Modrinth and all of the creators on it directly! 

As a Modrinth+ subscriber, you will get:

• Ad-free browsing on the Modrinth App and website

• An exclusive badge on your profile

• Half of your subscription will go to creators on the site!

• …and more coming soon!

Pricing starts at $5/month, with discounts depending on what region you live in and if you opt for an annual plan. 

We created Modrinth+ so people could help support Modrinth and creators on the site. We have no plans to paywall any content on Modrinth, and creator features will never cost money. We started Modrinth as a free and open-source platform, and we intend to keep it that way. 

If you do have a few extra dollars a month and want to help support Modrinth, this is a great way to do it!

New Site Design: Stage One

We’re launching Stage One of Modrinth’s refreshed look to Modrinth.com today as well. I want to stress that it’s not fully complete and we’re going to be continuing to refine and finish updating the rest of the pages over the coming weeks. However, it has enough significant usability improvements and new features that we’re launching it broadly now. Please bear with us while we work to complete it promptly!

Key new features include:

• New download interface to ensure users get the correct version for the Minecraft version and mod loader they’re using

• New versions list page built from the ground up with a clean new look and tons of shortcuts to make navigation easier

• New “compatibility” widget on project pages to see what game versions, platforms, and environments each mod supports at a glance

• Exclusion filters in search pages

• Improved support for vertical desktop displays

We know there will be some minor hiccups and disruptions of workflows, but we’d really appreciate it if you could gently let us know how a particular change has affected you on GitHub here (or upvote/comment on an existing issue) rather than declaring it’s the end of the world.

New Advertising

In the last few months, Modrinth has grown an incredible amount. We are now serving over a petabyte of data per month (that is, 1,000 terabytes!) to over 20 million unique IP addresses. It’s almost unfathomable how large we have become since we started from nothing just four years ago.

However, with growth like this, our costs have also grown drastically—primarily in bandwidth. This, unfortunately, means that we’ve grown well beyond what a single advertiser could support.

Our original plan was to build out our own ad network (Adrinth) where we could cut out the middleman and provide highly targeted ads without the need for tracking to our gaming-specific audience. Unfortunately, we’ve grown too quickly (a very good problem to have!) and don’t have the immediate resources to do this at this time.

This leaves us with no choice but to switch to a more traditional programmatic ads setup powered by Aditude for the time being. We're not making this decision lightly, and we understand that some folks will not be happy about this change. Rest assured, we've made sure that our new ad network partner meets our requirements, such as compliance with all local regulations such as GDPR and CCPA, and that the new ads remain as unobstructive as possible with this format.

These changes bring Modrinth back to sustainability as well as conservatively increasing creator revenue by three-fold! Along with paying hosting bills, the new income will also be used for more support staff and paid team members, decreasing ticket time and speeding up our development.

We also want to thank our friends over at BisectHosting for supporting us with our ad deal for the past year.

Modrinth App 0.8.1

Over the last few months, we’ve been overhauling the internals of the Modrinth App to drastically improve performance and stability. Over one hundred issues have been closed with this update alone! Here’s a short list of the major changes:

• Newer versions of Forge and NeoForge now work!

• Migrated internal launcher data to use SQLite. The app now loads in <40ms on average (compared to ~2.5s before)!

• Fixed issues where profiles could disappear in the UI 

• Fixed random cases of the UI freezing up during actions

• Fixed directory changes being very inconsistent

• Drastically improved offline mode 

• Fix freezing and include crash reports logs tab 

• And over one hundred more fixes!

Don’t have the Modrinth App? Check it out here!

Conclusion

Want to hear more from us on a regular basis? Check us out on our social media pages; we post often on both Mastodon and X/Twitter. You can also chat with us on Discord if you like that.

Thanks to intergrav for making the banner image.