Yesterday afternoon (European time), projectFLY's servers went offline which at first appeared to be standard downtime, as confirmed by its owner Matt Davies in their Discord server.

Several hours later, however, it emerged that their host Google had suspended their account and servers over unpaid bills. Matt wrote a long Facebook post yesterday explaining the situation, saying he thought he had until the end of this month to pay GBP £2,750.

He had raised about a third of the funds needed to maintain projectFLY until V4 is ready, but as he is currently unable to afford to pay the bill, projectFLY is down, "to some peoples delight."

He went on to say he was funding development out of his pocket for the last four months, which led him to request help from projectFLY's users.

Much of what was said after this was about the toxicity and negativity of the community. An extract from the Facebook post reads: "Those people who want everything for nothing, the people that severely dislike me but yet still use the projects I've created whilst spreading nothing but toxic rumors/negativity, huge development delays that were completely out of my control (that's a story for another day) and partially me for thinking I could continue to run something like projectFLY without some sort of proper financial model - they are some of the many reasons why we find projectFLY in the state it is now in."

Moreover, Matt confirmed the service is not dead, and that it will not die. If it cannot be revived now, then projectFLY will "remain down until v4 is ready."

Today meanwhile, sees another post by Matt, again on his Facebook page, initially praising those who understood the state of the community.

"I've had a lot of people ask where we're up to in terms of bringing things back online, so I'll keep this bit short," said Matt. "We've received £1,166/£2,629.44, so we're just under £1,500 left to go. The moment we hit the full amount, I will pay the bill - very shortly after that the servers will come back online. There shouldn't be much of a delay."

Matt continued by describing the fact that industry experts have stepped forward to offer their assistance to make projectFLY less costly, and that we can expect a before and after comparison to gain an insight into why it was so expensive to run.

Finally, Matt addressed subscriptions, and that he understood people are more interested in smaller payments. "Although we will still have a free tier, there will be, as I've discussed in the past, a "supporter" tier, starting at £1/month - once we're out of this situation and on our way to releasing v4, I'll come back with more information about the subscription tiers."

Users who wish to support Mettar Simulations can do so by donating to their PayPal link.

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UPDATE 10/16/19 12:24PM EDT

projectFLY's services are now back up and running.