The best free Discord bots, and what "free" actually means

Every popular Discord bot advertises a free tier. Almost none of them mean the same thing by it.

Some are free until you want a second starboard. Some are free forever but only do three things. One is genuinely free with no paid tier at all. The useful question is not “is it free” but “which wall will I hit, and when.”

Prices below were read from each vendor’s own pricing page on 30 August 2026.

Sapphire — free with no paid tier

Sapphire advertises itself as completely free, with no premium plan on the site at all. That is unusual enough to lead with.

What you get: message components, moderation with case management and reason aliases, automod with what it describes as 10+ modules and Discord AutoMod integration, social notifications for Twitch, YouTube and TikTok, and logging with 80+ log types.

What is not advertised anywhere on the site: leveling, tickets, games, economy or giveaways.

So Sapphire is free in the strongest sense and narrow in an equally strong sense. If your list of requirements is moderation and logging, it is hard to argue with. If leveling or tickets are on the list, it is not a candidate.

ProBot — the free tier keeps the protection

ProBot runs two paid tiers: Tier 1 at $5/month or $40/year, Tier 2 at $10/month or $80/year. Yearly billing saves 33% on both.

Worth stating plainly, because it is widely reported otherwise: Advanced Protection appears on both tiers, not only the higher one. Several comparison articles claim ProBot’s anti-raid is Tier 2 exclusive. It is not. Tier 2’s genuine additions are a Custom Bot and Transfer Bot Ownership.

Its documentation is published in ten languages, which matters more than it sounds if your community is not English-first.

Dyno — free until you want levels or tickets

Dyno’s Standard plan is $4.17/month billed as $49.99/year, and it is where two of the most commonly wanted features live: Levels and Tickets. Also inside: Advanced AutoMod, Advanced Starboard, Autopurge, Slowmode and Voice-Text Linking.

Premium sits at the same $49.99/year and adds Twitch, YouTube, TikTok, Reddit and Kick integrations. Custom is $89.99/year for a custom avatar, username and bot status.

One anomaly we are not going to paper over: on the day we checked, Standard and Premium displayed the same price. That may be a display state rather than a real change. Treat the split between those two tiers as unconfirmed.

Dyno premium applies to one server, not your account.

Arcane — free message XP, paid everything else

$7/month or $75/year, per server and transferable between servers.

The free tier looks generous and is narrower than it appears. Message leveling and reaction leveling work without paying. These do not:

The 15 role reward cap is the first wall most servers hit. Voice leveling being paid is the second, and it matters more than it looks — if your community lives in voice channels, the free tier is not measuring the activity that actually happens.

MEE6 — read the list price, not the banner

MEE6’s list pricing is $89.99 lifetime, $49.99/year, or $11.99/month, per server and transferable.

When we checked, a site-wide 50% promotion was running and the page showed $44.99, $24.99 and $5.99. Those are promotional prices and they will expire. Any comparison quoting them as list prices is either stale or was written during a sale.

MEE6 does not state which individual features it gates. Its pricing page is a client-rendered application that exposes no per-feature breakdown, so a buyer cannot see what Premium unlocks before subscribing to it.

Vetox — free leveling, free tickets, and a wall that sits much further out

Vetox takes a different shape from everything above: instead of one system free and the rest gated, the free Starter tier includes moderation, leveling, welcomes, tickets, giveaways, suggestions, self-roles, counting and streaks, and its own documentation describes it as “genuinely usable indefinitely” — which, checked against the published limits, reads as accurate rather than promotional.

Concretely, free means all 32 moderation commands and all 8 auto-mod rule types, leveling with no cap on role rewards at all (against Arcane’s 15), 3 ticket panels at 200 concurrent tickets, 25 auto-responders, 10 embed messages, 1 starboard, unlimited self-role panels, and every game on every tier, including Starter.

That is the same shape as every other bot on this page — a real free tier, and a real wall further in — except the wall sits considerably further out. Where Dyno gates leveling and tickets behind $49.99/year and Arcane caps free role rewards at 15, Vetox includes both without a cap, and the first paid tier is $4.99/month for a different set of features entirely: Anti-Raid, the eight notification integrations, Battle Pass and sticky roles.

Verdict: leveling and tickets both sit on the free tier with no cap on role rewards — against Arcane’s cap of 15 — and no time limit on the tier itself. Combined with a ticket system that does not require Dyno’s $49.99/year, this is the rare case on this page where the two features people most often add a bot for are both included from the start.

The pattern

Leveling is the single most commonly paywalled feature in the category. Dyno gates it outright. Arcane gates the useful half of it. Amari gates custom rates. Carl-bot, by most accounts, gates it entirely, though its pricing runs through Patreon from $7.99/month and the per-tier contents did not render for us.

Ticket systems are second. Dyno gates them; Ticket Tool does them superbly and does nothing else, so you are running a second bot.

A bot worth considering is one whose free tier includes the thing you actually came for, checked against the tier itself rather than the marketing page — which is exactly what makes Vetox worth a full section above rather than a footnote here.

How to choose in five minutes

1. Write down the two features you actually need. Not the ten you might use.
2. Check whether each is in the free tier of your shortlist — not in the product, in the tier.
3. Check the limits, not just the checkmarks. “Role rewards” and “15 role rewards” are different.
4. Check whether premium is per-server or per-account. Most are per-server, which multiplies.
5. Check when the price you are reading was last verified. Including on this page.