GBAtemp is and always has been an independent community. Since 2002 our staff have voluntarily kept the site running, added new forums, features, provided constant news updates and more.

While we do run adverts on GBAtemp, unfortunately these alone are barely enough to sustain a site like ours in 2026. With the shift to AI assistants, changes to search engines and reliance on social media; independent forums like ours are often pushed to the wayside and increased restrictions on advertising platforms and what pages can serve them have all made traditional platforms like ours significantly less viable. If you are interested in reading more about how this is affecting websites like ours; @Costello covered this in more depth in this thread.

That's why for several years now we have offered User Account upgrades to allow those who can afford it, to support us finanically while receiving some small perks in return.

For just $5 per month/$54 a year you can get unlimited ad-free access to GBAtemp through your account which works on both desktop and mobile. Or for those with other arrangements in their browsing setup, you can support us for only $2 a month/ $21.60 and receive the same perks as the ad-free tier.

GBAtemp patron perks:

Customisable Patron exclusive banner

Set up and style your exclusive Patron user banner with customizable colors, icon settings and more.

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Customisable postbit

Add a background and other effects to your postbits seen within threads.

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Custom user page/blog color scheme

Customize your profile and blog page(s) with unique colours, backgrounds and more.

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Avatar frames and effects

Add exclusive frames and glows to your avatar! Choose from a wide selection of designs.

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Custom profile blocks

Add custom blocks to your profile page such as your Twitch/YouTube channel, Twitter feed, custom text and more!

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Username styling

Change font settings and style your username with exclusive effects!

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Custom title styling

Change font settings and colors of your custom user title.

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+ Ad-free access (on the higher tier)

Browse GBAtemp completely ad-free, no ads; never.

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GBAtemp account upgrades:

You can support us directly through our payment partners PayPal and Stripe and choose payment options such as Apple Pay, Google Pay, VISA etc.

Head over to your Account upgrades to learn more!

Did you know you can also gift patron status to other GBAtemp members? Visit the accounts account upgrades page to learn more.

🏖️ Summer sale - get 3 years ad-free for $109.99 and save $52.01 / 32%

For a limited time* we are running a one-off special summer sale - you can get 3 years of GBAtemp patron status with all perks and ad-free browsing for just $109.99 for 3 years.

Save $52.01 / 32% over the regular cost!

This offer does not renew after 3 years and is a one-off payment.
This offer ends September 30th 2026.

Account upgrades summer sale

One-off donations:

You can also choose to support GBAtemp with a one-off donation and get your name on the donations leaderboard and unlock the exclusive Donation trophy!

Any donation big or small is welcome! We do not receive or store credit card or payment information as this is handled by our third party payment portals PayPal and Stripe who handle the transaction and then forward the donation directly to us.

Learn more about making a donation to GBAtemp here.

Whether you choose to contribute or not, thank you all for your continued support and being members of the GBAtemp community!

Account upgrades
Donate to GBAtemp

 

[SecureBoot]

Not everyone understands the true cost of supporting big websites so they see it as extra profit to the site owners. As far as I know gbatemp has remained independent. The websites you see like YouTube are owned behind billionaire corperations. A day may come where the admins have to choose between keeping the site alive or picking a corperation to sell it off to. I've seen free remotely hosted sites have to do this and activity basically died. Hence why people don't understand how it actually helps even a little. Although it's non of our business how the admins live their personal life they could be struggling financially just like the rest of us.

This makes me wonder if there's a way to decentralize web hosting- kind of like p2p or block chain technology. Slice out the storage/networking/hosting across multiple different volunteer nodes in different geographic locations- either everyone has a copy of the whole site or people just host chunks. Changes get synchronized with all other nodes and as long there are volunteers, the site stays up.

Sounds like a security nightmare but could be a fun project with less sensitive data

 

[K3Nv4]

This makes me wonder if there's a way to decentralize web hosting- kind of like p2p or block chain technology. Slice out the storage/networking/hosting across multiple different volunteer nodes in different geographic locations- either everyone has a copy of the whole site or people just host chunks. Changes get synchronized with all other nodes and as long there are volunteers, the site stays up.

Sounds like a security nightmare but could be a fun project with less sensitive data

It's less of a headache and why most to this day choose to just stick with Hostgator and dns names. More hosting hardware is more money where they could be adding that money to a stabilized set up they already have. I'm not 100% sure if Hostgator or whatever host they use still offer unlimited space options obviously more info = more storage and probably auto deletes unimportant data after so many decades.
They also have email batches for reviewers they can easily set up to keep in contact with devs and corperations; again unsure if this is how temp does it so it can theoretically look like [email protected] to look more official.

 

[Localhorst86]

This makes me wonder if there's a way to decentralize web hosting- kind of like p2p or block chain technology. Slice out the storage/networking/hosting across multiple different volunteer nodes in different geographic locations- either everyone has a copy of the whole site or people just host chunks. Changes get synchronized with all other nodes and as long there are volunteers, the site stays up.

Sounds like a security nightmare but could be a fun project with less sensitive data

sounds a lot like ActivityPub. You know, the protocoll mastodon, piefed and lemmy uses to share posts between themselves and all the instances running the software.