Show HN: Pay-as-you-play game servers from Discord (£2/mo, four games)
A new pay-as-you-play game server hosting service has been launched, allowing users to host Steam games on demand. The service is controlled via Discord and automatically shuts down when not in use, making it cost-effective for casual gamers. It is open source and designed for groups who want to avoid high monthly fees for idle servers.
- ▪The service supports various Steam games and can be set up in about a minute.
- ▪It is built for groups that play a few hours a week, significantly reducing hosting costs.
- ▪The hosting solution is open source and does not require any paid tiers or signups.
Hacker News (Newest) files mainly under programming. We currently carry 5,306 of its stories.
Story provenance
Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record
inspect →
Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | GitHub |
| Canonical URL | https://github.com/jdmcgrath/steam-server-on-demand |
| Publication time | Wed, 20 May 2026 11:55:27 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-20T12:05:02.589Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-20T12:05:02.589Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | Ww6qECDi0kDu |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
steam-server-on-demand Pay-as-you-play dedicated hosting for any Steam game with A2S support. Discord-controlled. Spins up on demand in about a minute, auto-shuts down when nobody's playing, and persists your world saves across sessions. Built for groups who play a few hours a week and don't want a flat £10–20 per month hosting bill for a server that sits idle 95% of the time. Not a business pitch — there's no SaaS, no paid tier, no signup. It's open source (MIT) for anyone who wants cheap dedicated hosting for the games they play with their friends.
…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at GitHub.