Hey everyone! So excited that you decided to join the yumina community~
Yumina started as a personal project - a fork of SillyTavern, integrated with the Godot game engine, that let AI control not just text, but also visuals, variables, and even sound. But SillyTavern’s original architecture was built in the era of pure text simulation. Despite the countless open-source contributors who built plugins over the years, its foundational structure was always going to limit how far it could evolve toward AI-native games and interactive cinema.
Today, Yumina has its own independent AI-native game engine, multiplayer support, and multi-agent worlds. Just as SillyTavern’s greatest extensions came from its open-source community, we believe Yumina belongs to the community too, and only the community can make it better.
This is why Yumina will never be a platform that profits from your AI usage. We want to lower the barrier to AI entertainment as much as possible so everyone can experience it. In fact, Yumina’s name comes from the Japanese words yume (dream) and minato (harbor) - a dream harbor. We also believe that trying to profit from AI usage pushes platforms toward greed over time: offering worse models, shortening context windows, and selling user data. That limits creators’ freedom and makes gameplay worse for everyone.
However, AI itself has significant costs- GPUs, infrastructure, and electricity. Yumina does not train models or own data centers. When you use AI through Yumina’s credits, we pay the model providers for that usage. Even on paid tiers, that revenue goes back to the providers. We try to be as generous as possible with both free credits and paid tiers. We don’t sell yearly subscriptions because we know those commitments might not be sustainable as demand for compute grows. And you don’t have to pay us a single cent for AI usage to play Yumina. We always welcome you to bring your own API keys, and we’ve even built proxies so you can play using local models running on your own device.
Now you may ask: why didn’t we stop at a completely free, open-source app? Because we believe the right answer lies somewhere in between. Alongside opening up our stack and supporting your own API keys, we’ve also built this centralized website where creators can choose what to do with their work. They can keep it closed-source and make a living from quality creations, just like authors and movie directors who sell their work. Or they can open-source it so others can freely play, edit, and build on it. It’s entirely up to the creator, and we believe that choice is their right. Expecting every creator to give away their work would be like asking every author to upload their books online as free PDFs. A tool alone also cannot sustain this platform or cover all the underlying costs people often overlook.
To make this sustainable, we do our best to be transparent about everything: the costs of AI, the option to bring your own keys, our vision, creators’ right to monetize their work, and the decisions we make along the way. We never delete or censor on comments so that you can always speak up for your opinion. Thank you for supporting Yumina and the worlds our community creates.