Cfx.re Element Club and FiveM Platform Licenses Explained: Slots, OneSync and What Each Tier Buys
Cfx.re Element Club and FiveM Platform Licenses Explained: Slots, OneSync and What Each Tier Buys
Your server key is free. Your slot ceiling stops being free at a certain point, and so does the ability to put custom clothing on your players. That’s Cfx.re’s licensing model in two sentences. The detail underneath is what stops you paying $15 a month for something you don’t need, or trying to run a 90-player city on a tier that hard-caps you at 64. Here’s what FiveM Element Club actually sells, tier by tier, using the numbers currently published by Cfx.re rather than the ones the rest of the internet copied years ago and never revisited.
What does the free Cfx.re license include?
Every FXServer needs a registration key generated at the Cfx Portal and dropped into server.cfg as sv_licenseKey. That key costs nothing, and with no subscription attached it runs a server of up to 48 players on OneSync Infinity. You get the full scripting runtime, a server browser listing, txAdmin and unlimited map and vehicle streaming. What you don’t get is custom clothing streaming.
That free ceiling is more generous than most people realise, and it is the single most misreported figure in the FiveM ecosystem. A brand-new roleplay city that peaks at 30 players on a Saturday night has no technical reason to pay Cfx.re anything at all. Spend that money on a better CPU instead.
The three Element Club tiers, side by side
| Tier | Price | Max slots (OneSync) | Max slots (Infinity) | Extras |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| No subscription | Free | 48 | 48 | — |
| Argentum | $15/mo + VAT | 64 | 64 | Custom clothing streaming |
| Aurum | $25/mo + VAT | 64 | 128 | Custom clothing streaming |
| Platinum | $50/mo + VAT | 128 | 2048 | Clothing streaming, animated server icon, magenta listing highlight |
Read that table twice, because the interesting cell is the one people never check: Argentum gets you nothing extra from Infinity. The 64-slot cap applies regardless of your onesync mode — plain or Infinity, you stop at 64. Owners routinely buy Argentum, flip to Infinity expecting 128, and file a support ticket when the server refuses to advertise above 64. Infinity only pays off from Aurum upward.
Why so many licensing guides quote dead numbers
Element Club used to be a Patreon product. It isn’t any more — Patreon-based subscriptions ended on 1 December 2025 and billing now runs through the Cfx Portal directly. Keymaster is gone too; its Assets and Grants pages shut down in October 2025 and key generation moved to portal.cfx.re, where the form asks for a display name and no longer demands your server’s public IPv4 address up front.
Three stale claims still circulate widely, and every one of them will cost you money or a wasted evening:
- “The free tier is 32 slots.” It’s 48, on Infinity.
- “Platinum is $60.” It’s $50 plus VAT.
- “Aurum gives you 128 slots.” Only on Infinity. On plain OneSync it’s 64, same as Argentum.
Before you act on any tier advice — including this article — pull up the official server hosting page and check the figures yourself. Cfx.re changes them without fanfare, and third-party blogs rarely notice for a year or more.
Buying slots does not buy performance
This is the misconception that burns the most money. A subscription raises the number of players Cfx.re will permit you to advertise. It does not make your server capable of holding them. Your real ceiling is set by single-core CPU clock speed, your database round-trip times, and the combined resmon cost of everything in your resources folder.
Plenty of servers have gone from Argentum to Platinum, set sv_maxclients 128, and discovered that the city becomes unplayable at 70 because a badly written job script runs a 0.8ms client loop for every player in the session. Platinum did nothing about that. An afternoon spent profiling with resmon 1 and replacing two bloated resources with lean, well-maintained alternatives from a reputable FiveM script store would have bought you more concurrent players than the upgrade did, and it’s a one-off cost rather than a recurring one.
The honest test: if your server already hitches at 45 players, buying a higher tier makes it hitch at 45 players with a longer queue behind it.
Custom clothing is the real reason to buy Argentum
Slots get all the attention, but for most servers the actual trigger for that first $15 is clothing streaming. Any add-on clothing or EUP on a public server requires Argentum or higher. There’s a documented exception for development: a server with fewer than 9 slots can stream clothing without a subscription, which is exactly the setup you want for a local test box while you’re building character customisation.
That exception is genuinely useful. Build and validate your entire clothing pipeline on an 8-slot dev server for free, confirm the ytyp and metadata are clean, then subscribe on the day you go public. If your concept leans on detailed character looks — a heavy civilian RP city, a UK emergency services server, anything where players judge you on how they look in a mirror — Argentum is a day-one cost, no matter that you’re peaking at 25 players. Budget for the clothing packs too; a decent EUP or civilian wardrobe set from a FiveM asset marketplace will cost more than a couple of months of the subscription that lets you stream it.
There is no priority queue tier
Worth stating plainly, because it comes up constantly: Cfx.re does not sell queue priority. Nothing in Argentum, Aurum or Platinum gives your donors a shorter wait. Queue behaviour is entirely server-side, handled by hardcap, txAdmin or a dedicated queue resource that reads identifiers against your own priority list. Likewise, the “pilot” features people expect from higher tiers amount to Platinum’s animated server icon and the magenta highlight on your public listing. Both are cosmetic. Both help discovery a little. Neither is worth $50 on its own.
When is upgrading worth it?
Decide on peak concurrent players and your streaming needs, not on ambition. A practical ladder:
- Stay free if you peak under 40 and stream no custom clothing. Most servers in their first six months live here and shouldn’t feel bad about it.
- Argentum ($15) the moment you stream clothing publicly, or when peak concurrency hits 45 and a queue forms on your busiest night.
- Aurum ($25) when 60+ peak is routine and the queue no longer clears within an hour. Switch to Infinity at the same time or you’ve paid $10 extra for nothing.
- Platinum ($50) at a sustained 120+ peak, or when the animated icon genuinely matters for standing out in a crowded listing category.
Track one number to make this decision honestly: fill rate, meaning your peak concurrent divided by sv_maxclients. If you’re peaking at 52 on a 128-slot Aurum server, your fill rate is 41% and you upgraded too early. Below roughly 60% at peak, you’re paying for air. Above 90% with a persistent queue, you’re turning away players and the next tier pays for itself.
Fitting the license into your server economics
Cost per slot flatters the higher tiers and misleads accordingly. Argentum works out at $0.23 per slot per month, Aurum at $0.20 on Infinity, Platinum at $0.02 if you take the 2048 figure seriously. Nobody runs 2048. Measure cost against peak concurrent players you actually hold and Platinum at a realistic 150 players lands around $0.33 per player — the most expensive tier per real body in the city, not the cheapest.
Two practical notes for the budget. Every price is quoted plus VAT, so a UK or EU owner should mentally add 20–25%: Aurum is closer to $30 than $25 once your tax rate lands. And since late July 2026, Cfx.re bundles 30-day hosting offers from partner providers (Nitrado, Nodecraft, Shockbyte, xRealm and ZAP-Hosting) with active subscriptions, scaling by tier — xRealm’s bundle, for example, provides 64 slots on Argentum and 128 on Aurum or Platinum, while Shockbyte’s excludes Brazil and Japan. If you’re subscribing anyway, claim the bundle; it can offset most of a month’s licence cost.
In context, the subscription is a rounding error. A 60-player city typically spends $60–$120 a month on hosting and considerably more on assets. Aurum at $25 is the cheapest line on that invoice and the only one that scales sub-linearly — going from 64 to 128 slots costs $10 more per month from Cfx.re, and roughly double from your host.
Licensing and monetization are separate systems
An Element Club subscription buys capacity. It buys no permission to sell anything. Monetization rights come from the Creator Platform License Agreement — updated most recently on 12 January 2026 to align with Rockstar’s Terms of Service — and from running sales through Tebex, Cfx.re’s exclusive monetization partner. Platinum does not widen what you’re allowed to sell, and cancelling your subscription does not revoke your right to monetize.
Where the two touch is capacity planning. If your revenue model leans on selling priority access, you need enough slot headroom that regular players still get in, or you’ll be refunding people who paid to skip a queue that never moves. Servers that get this balance right treat the licence as infrastructure and keep their storefront squarely on the cosmetic and convenience side of the rules, the way established Tebex storefronts structure their packages.
Get the sequencing right and the whole thing is simple: run free until something concrete forces your hand, upgrade on measured fill rate rather than on a good week, and re-check the official figures before every renewal. The tier that fits your server this quarter is almost always one step lower than the one you were about to buy.
Free Scripts on Tebex
