# What publishing costs — the whole table

Every number here is either $0 or a store's published fee. Where a
number comes from the stores themselves, it says so — these are their
prices, not ours, and they can change them.

| Step | Cost | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Export your game (Godot / web) | $0 | The engine is MIT; templates are a download, not a fee |
| List on itch.io | $0 | No listing fee, no approval queue |
| itch.io revenue share | Your choice, 0–100% (default 10%) | You set it on the project page; free games with the donation button are common |
| Free-tier hosting (Cloudflare Pages / Netlify / GitHub Pages) | $0 | Service free tiers — see the class note in `hosting-routes.md` |
| A custom domain (optional) | Varies by registrar | The first thing that can cost anything — and it is optional. Your itch and host URLs work without one |
| Google Play (later, optional) | **$25, one-time** | Google's developer registration fee — their number |
| Steam (later, optional) | **$100 per game** | The Steam Direct fee, per Valve's Steamworks page — their number |

**The comparison that matters:** a beginner's first shipped game, in
the community's own accounting, cost $45 total — and the game itself
was $0 of it (the rest was the AI subscription and the Play fee).
Publishing is not the expensive step anymore. Finishing is the hard
step, and it's the one the rest of the Forge is for.