Which Discord bots charge for leveling

If you add a bot to a Discord server for one reason, it is usually leveling. Members earn XP for talking, roles unlock at thresholds, and the server gets a visible reason to keep showing up.

It is also the feature most likely to sit behind a paywall — and the paywalls are rarely where you would expect them.

Dyno puts leveling behind its cheapest paid tier

Dyno’s Standard plan is $4.17 per month, billed as $49.99 per year. Two of the things most servers want are inside it rather than outside: Levels and Tickets. So do Advanced AutoMod, Advanced Starboard, Autopurge, Slowmode and Voice-Text Linking.

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

One oddity worth flagging: on the day we checked, Standard and Premium displayed the same price. That may be a display state rather than a genuine change, so treat the split between those two tiers as unconfirmed until it settles.

Dyno premium applies to one server of your choice, not your account.

Arcane gives you message XP and charges for the rest

Arcane is $7 per month or $75 per year, also per server and transferable between them.

Its free tier is more generous than Dyno’s on the surface — message leveling and reaction leveling both work without paying. The limits are in the details:

The 15 role reward cap is the one that bites first. Fifteen sounds like plenty until you build a progression ladder, at which point you are choosing between rewriting your role structure and paying $75 a year.

Voice leveling being paid also matters more than it looks. If your community lives in voice channels — most gaming servers do — then Arcane’s free tier is not measuring the activity that actually happens.

ProBot charges by protection tier, not by feature

ProBot splits differently. Tier 1 is $5 per month or $40 per year. Tier 2 is $10 per month or $80 per year. Both include Advanced Protection, More Variables, Server Statistics and Twitch and YouTube notifications. Tier 2’s genuine additions are a Custom Bot and Transfer Bot Ownership.

That is worth stating plainly because it is widely reported otherwise: several comparison articles claim ProBot’s anti-raid protection is Tier 2 only. On ProBot’s own pricing page, Advanced Protection appears on both tiers. The Tier 2 description mentions anti-raid, which is the likely source of the confusion.

Yearly billing is a flat 33% saving on both tiers.

MEE6 does not charge for part of leveling. It charges for all of it.

MEE6’s list pricing is $89.99 lifetime, $49.99 per year, or $11.99 per month, per server and transferable. When we checked, a site-wide 50% promotion was running, showing $44.99, $24.99 and $5.99 — those are promotional prices, not list prices, and they will expire.

The gating took three passes to read, because MEE6’s pricing page is a client-rendered application. Reading it properly meant decoding the tick and cross icons from the page itself, then confirming the result against MEE6’s own support-portal article.

Its own 37-row comparison table marks the free column with a cross on 31 of them. XP and Levels is one of the crosses. So are Moderation, Welcome messages, Custom commands, Reaction Roles and Giveaways.

What a free MEE6 server actually gets is Search anything, Achievements, Starboard, and one timed message.

This is worth sitting with, because it inverts the usual assumption. MEE6 is the bot most people meet first, and its ubiquity gets read as generosity. On its own published numbers, it is the least generous free tier in this comparison by a wide margin — and unlike the others here, there is no partial version of leveling to grow out of. There is no leveling.

Vetox doesn’t gate leveling, or cap what it rewards

Vetox’s leveling system is free on the Starter tier with no cap on role rewards written into the product at all — not a high number, an absent one. A free server can hand out a role at every level, on both message XP and voice XP, remove a member’s previous reward when a higher one is earned, and DM the member when it happens. Set against Arcane’s free-tier cap of 15 role rewards at one per level, a Vetox server can express a tiered progression ladder — a colour rank and a perk rank awarded at the same level, say — that a free Arcane server cannot.

Voice XP is free too, which is unusual: among the major dedicated levelling bots, Arcane and Amari both charge for it, and Tatsu and Lurkr don’t offer it at any price. Custom XP rates and multipliers are free as well, and so is a genuine scheduled double-XP event a server can turn on for a weekend — a mechanic none of Arcane, Amari, Tatsu, Lurkr or ActivityRank offer at any price. What is paid is the Battle Pass, a seasonal track of quests layered on top of the XP counter, which requires Basic ($4.99/month) and ships with zero seasons and zero quests on Starter.

Verdict: of the bots that gate leveling on this page, Vetox is the contrast case — free, with no role-reward cap and voice XP included, where the only paid step up is a seasonal extra rather than leveling itself.

The pattern underneath

Leveling is the hook rather than the product. It is free enough to get you invested and limited exactly where a growing server starts to feel the constraint — voice activity, custom XP curves, the number of role rewards. MEE6 skips the hook entirely and charges at the door.

But this is not a category-wide truth, and it would be easy to write it as one. Leveling is paid on MEE6, Dyno and Carl-bot — which happen to be the three best-known names, and that is precisely why “MEE6 alternative” searches are so often really leveling searches. Across sixteen multipurpose bots we checked, eight ship leveling free: ProBot, Koya, Atlas, Maki, Loritta, Miki, NadekoBot and Pancake. Vetox is also among them, and with no role-reward cap at all, as the section above shows.

Sapphire advertises no paid tier at all, but does not list a leveling system among its features, so it is not an alternative if leveling is what you came for.

If you are choosing today, the useful question is not “is leveling free” but “which part of leveling is free.” Check voice XP, custom XP rates and the role reward cap before you commit — those three are where the money is. The free leveling tiers ranked on voice XP and role-reward headroom covers two of the three directly.

A note on these numbers

Every price and limit above was read from the vendor’s own pricing page on 30 August 2026, not from another comparison article. Bot pricing changes often and promotions come and go. If you are reading this well after that date, verify before you buy — and tell us if something has moved.