Star Citizen Price: What the Game Actually Costs

The short answer

Star Citizen costs one payment of roughly $45 to $60 for a game package, and nothing after that is required. No monthly subscription, no ship you have to buy to stay competitive, no paywall between you and the next patch. That single purchase is permanent and it is the only thing a new player needs.

The game still carries a reputation as a money pit, and that reputation is not invented. Both things are true at once: the ticket in costs less than a standard $70 console release, and the ceiling is genuinely absurd — Cloud Imperium crossed $1 billion in crowdfunding in May 2026, the first game in history to do it. The only question worth answering is where the line sits between the two. That is what this page is for.

What you are actually buying: the game package

The unit of sale on the RSI store is called a game package, sometimes a starter pack. It is the only purchase you need, and it contains:

• Game access, tied permanently to your RSI account
• A ship, which is yours for good
• A hangar to keep it in
• A starting amount of UEC, the account currency
• A stretch of ship insurance, usually a few months

The part most buyers do not realize until after the fact: this is a one-time payment. Cloud Imperium has said since the original FAQ that buying the starting game is all that is asked and that no monthly usage fee will ever be charged. Chris Roberts repeated it in a 2018 letter to backers — the funding model deliberately does not lean on a subscription the way most MMOs do.

The entry tiers, in orders of magnitude

The catalog moves constantly. Packs get retired, entry ships get swapped out, discounts come and go around the big events. Exact numbers on a page like this go stale in weeks, so here are stable brackets instead.

Which ship to pick is a separate question, answered on the best starter ship page. On price, the only thing that matters here is this: the cheapest pack grants exactly the same game access as the $3,000 one. Nothing is gated behind the higher tiers.

What you actually get charged at checkout

Three things separate the number on the product page from the number on your card statement, and they catch American buyers more often than you would think.

Tax is added at the end. RSI prices everything in US dollars and, depending on your store region, shows them before tax. Sales tax is applied at checkout based on the billing address attached to your payment method — so a Californian and a Delawarean pay different totals for the same pack. RSI does not process tax-exemption IDs at checkout, and the tax portion is not counted toward the pledge value if you ever reclaim it.

The store is the only seller. There is no competing retailer to undercut it, because the game is not distributed on Steam or the Epic Games Store and there is no console version. That is why you will not find the usual key-reseller discount on a legitimate copy.

There is a refund window. RSI publishes a refund policy in its own knowledge base: requests go through a support ticket from the account that made the purchase, within a window measured in weeks from the order date rather than hours, and some regions carry a shorter statutory cancellation right on top of that. Past the window, the normal path is reclaiming the pledge to store credit instead of cash. The policy has been revised more than once, so read the current version on the RSI site before you commit.

Is there a subscription? Not the kind you are thinking of

Two paid tiers exist, Centurion and Imperator, at roughly $10 and $20 a month, with discounted annual options. Neither unlocks gameplay. They fund the development shows and the digital magazine, and in return they give you a rotating ship to try each month, REC to rent equipment in Arena Commander, hangar decorations and forum flair.

That distinction is the single most useful thing on this page, so here is the arithmetic. A subscription MMO at $15 a month runs $180 a year, every year, forever. Star Citizen's honest first year looks like this:

Year two is the same table with the first row removed. That is the whole model.

Is Squadron 42 included?

No, and the answer is blunter than that. Squadron 42, the single-player campaign, has always been a separate product from the persistent universe — sold on its own or inside combo packages. Cloud Imperium removed it from the store in 2023, saying it would return later at a changed price, and it has not come back as a standalone purchase since.

Practically: a game package bought today gives you the persistent universe, not the campaign, and there is no official way to pre-order the campaign. CIG has aimed at a 2026 release without committing hard to it.

The optional spending, and the whale trap

This is where the reputation comes from. Three categories of spending reach genuinely silly numbers, and not one of them is needed to play.

1. Ships sold for cash

The pledge store lists hundreds of ships individually, from about $50 for the smallest to several thousand for capital hulls. The headline number belongs to the Legatus pack, a bundle of the entire fleet priced at $48,000 and visible only to Concierge accounts, the tier reserved for very large contributors. That figure is real. In May 2026 CIG also sold a concept battlecruiser at $5,000 a unit, by invitation.

What the headlines leave out: CIG committed in its original FAQ to never selling anything that cannot be obtained by playing. Those same ships are purchasable with aUEC in the persistent universe. Paying cash buys time, not access and not capability.

2. Concept sales

Some ships are sold as concepts — artwork and a spec sheet, sometimes years before they are flyable. For a new player this is the worst possible purchase: you are paying for something you cannot fly, on a timeline nobody controls. Wait until a ship is in the game and rentable before you even think about it.

3. The subscription, again

Covered above, but it belongs on this list because it is a recurring charge and it is the one people forget to cancel. It buys community content, not progress.

Buying UEC — and why the referral bonus makes it unnecessary

Two currencies coexist, and confusing them is expensive. UEC sits on your RSI account: you can buy it on the store, you receive it from a referral bonus, and it survives the database wipes that come with major alpha patches. aUEC is what you earn in game, and it is reset at every major wipe.

UEC is sold for real money in fixed increments, at a rate that has held for years at roughly 1,000 UEC per dollar. Do the math on the referral program and the number gets interesting: the 50,000 UEC credited for using a referral code is about $50 of store currency you never have to buy — near enough the price of the game package itself.

That is why the code belongs on a page about price rather than only on a page about signup. It does not discount your cart. What it does is remove the pull you feel forty minutes after your first landing, when you realize your starter ship has no cargo grid and the store has a fix for $25. With 50,000 UEC already banked, that pull mostly goes away.

The catch is the timing. The code has to be entered while you create the RSI account, or within 24 hours of creating it. There is no second chance, no support ticket that fixes it, and one account can only ever use one code once. The bonus itself is released when you buy your first game package — so the natural order is: create the account with the code, then buy the pack. Doing it the other way around costs you the 50,000 UEC. Details are on the referral code page.

What actually moves the number you pay

Four levers exist — Free Fly weeks, the big official events like Invictus Launch Week and the Intergalactic Aerospace Expo, warbond versions of packs, and the referral code — and they do not work the same way. Some cut the amount billed, others add content without touching the price, and a few things widely described online as "Star Citizen coupons" do not exist at all. Sorting that out properly takes its own page: it is on Star Citizen promo codes. This page sticks to the price itself.

The cost nobody counts: the PC

One last line, and often the heaviest. Star Citizen is PC only, through the official RSI launcher. It is a demanding build — a fast NVMe SSD and plenty of RAM matter more than they do in most games — and for a lot of buyers the hardware upgrade costs more than the game package did. If your machine is more than a few years old, price that in before you price the pack. System requirements and the install itself are covered on the download Star Citizen page.

Before you check out

Buying the game package is the moment the referral bonus is released — but only if the code was already on the account. Enter it first, at signup or within 24 hours. It costs nothing.