OpenSim prices drop to lowest average ever, under $13 per month

As OpenSim technology continues to improve, prices are dropping. The average 15,000-prim region in OpenSim is now $12.89 a month.

The median price is now $10 a month, unchanged from what we had in 2021, but the average has fallen more than $2, from $15.18 last year.

And that number is deceptive since some grids don’t even offer regions that hold as few as 15,000 prims. For example, Wolf Territories Grid only offers 80,000-prim regions. Their regions are also bigger than the Second Life standard — they are four-by-four variable-sized regions, meaning that they are the equivalent of 16 Second Life regions in land area.

That’s not unusual. Many grids now offer varregions allowing buyers to get a great deal of land at a very reasonable price.

Historic land prices in OpenSim. (Hypergrid Business data.)The lowest price for a standard-sized regions, not counting special sales, discounts, or low-prim regions, is $3.76 a month at Virtual Life Brasil.

Most of the big commercial grids, including DigiWorldz, Kitely, AviTron, GBG World, Alternate Metaverse, AviWorlds, and ZetaWorlds, range between $8 and $15 a month.

All of these grids have been around for a while now, showing that these prices are very much sustainable.

Only four of the 31 grids that publish their prices were at $20 or over. Two of them were exactly $20. The highest-priced grid, Exo-Life, charges $50 per region.

OpenSim grid price distribution as of October 2022.

Here’s the full list of OpenSim grid prices for a standard-sized region, or the closest larger equivalent, sorted by price:

Does your grid offer region rentals and is not on our lists? Email me at maria@hypergridbusiness.com with a link to your land rental page. This should be a public page on your website that lists prim totals and land area for each region package.

I would also like to remind grid owners to make it easier for people to buy land. Check out the purchase page at Party Destination Grid. I love their page! GBG World, ZetaWorlds, DigiWorldz, Dynamic Worldz, and Discovery Grid also have nice, clean region order pages with “buy now” buttons. All you really need from a buyer is their avatar name, the name of their new region, and their money. And it’s okay to get their money first, ask for their avatar and region name later.

And even the avatar name is optional — do you really care if people buy regions without registering on your grid? You get their money, and some other grid has to deal with their inventories.

The easier it is for buyers to find your land purchase page and buy a region, the more money you’ll make from land sales. Each additional hoop you force people to jump through will reduce the number of customers in half. People will go somewhere else to buy their regions — or just run a free DreamGrid on their home computer. The reason they’re paying money is so that they don’t have to worry about anything like server capacity or the number of cores or the allocated database size. Put all that stuff in a pop-up data sheet that is normally out of the way so it doesn’t scare people. And by people, I mean me. I was a math major but I still don’t like seeing a giant wall of numbers.

Maria Korolov