What a Minecraft mod port costs, and why

Almost every quote you will get for a mod port is a number with no reasoning attached, which makes it impossible to tell a fair one from a guess. Four things actually set the price, and only one of them has anything to do with how big the mod is.

This is the model I quote from, written out in full. You can use it to sanity check my price, or anyone else's.

The thing that does not drive the price: file count

Moving registrations, item classes and recipes across is the bulk of the changed lines in most ports. It is also the safest part of the job, because the compiler refuses to build until you have finished it. Work the compiler catches is cheap work.

What costs money is the work the compiler cannot see: behaviour that silently changed between versions, a mixin that still applies but now targets the wrong thing, a registry that moved phase. So a quote built by counting files is measuring the safe sixty per cent and ignoring the risky forty.

1. Version walls, the dominant factor

Version distance is not linear. Two versions apart can be a recompile, or it can be a rewrite, depending entirely on whether the gap contains one of four structural breaks. If a port crosses one of these, the wall sets the floor no matter how small the mod is.

Some jumps that look large are trivial: 1.19.2 to 1.20.1, 1.20 to 1.20.1, and 1.20.2 to 1.20.4 are mostly recompiles. Some jumps that look small are not: 1.20.4 to 1.21 crosses data components.

2. Loader direction, which is not symmetric

People tend to price a loader change as one flat surcharge in either direction. That is wrong by an order of magnitude, because the six possible directions are nothing like each other.

If you have been quoted the same premium for Forge to NeoForge as for Fabric to Forge, one of those two numbers is wrong. I wrote a separate piece on what actually breaks in a Fabric to Forge port if you want to see where the hours go.

3. What the mod touches

Effort scales by subsystem crossed with wall. Raw size barely matters. The same wall lands very differently depending on what the mod does:

• Items, blocks, recipes, creative tabs. Cheap almost everywhere, except across data components.
• Worldgen, biomes, structures. Cheap now, brutal across 1.18.
• Entities with custom rendering or animation. Mid, and it is where silent breakage lives. Animation libraries have initialisation order rules that produce no error when you get them wrong.
• Anything storing data on an ItemStack. Cheap below 1.20.5, expensive above it.
• Heavy networking. Below 1.20.2 it is routine; above it, the packet layer has to be rebuilt by hand.

This is why I ask what the mod does before I quote, rather than just how many files it has.

4. Licence, which decides whether the job exists at all

Before any of the above matters, the mod has to be legally portable. I check the LICENSE file in the source repository, not the licence field on the mod page, because the two disagree more often than you would expect and only one of them is the actual grant.

• Permissive licences such as MIT and Apache mean a public port with credit to the original author is fine.
• Copyleft licences such as GPL and LGPL allow the port, but it inherits the same licence, so the ported source has to stay open. Decide that deliberately, before it surprises you.
• No licence file at all means all rights reserved by default. There is no grey area there, and assuming otherwise is a mistake. That job needs written permission from the author first.
• All rights reserved with permission is billable, delivered privately to you, and priced higher, because it cannot be reused and it carries the paperwork.

I would rather lose a job at this step than hand you something that gets taken down later.

The actual numbers

These are the base figures I price from, so this table and any quote I give agree. Everything stacks additively rather than as a chain of percentages, which is what makes it checkable.

Minimum of $20 on any job, including the one line fixes, because every job carries the same intake, licence check, build and boot test regardless of how small the change is.

A real job, added up

Mindful Eating by camcam_burger, a food variety mod. It ran on Forge 1.20.1 and had to end up on NeoForge 1.21.1. What that actually involved:

• The per player data system rebuilt on native data attachments, which also let the Blueprint dependency go, at the creator's own suggestion.
• The food stat tweaks moved onto the 1.21 component system, because the old approach does not exist there any more.
• A HUD, so client and server behaviour both had to be checked rather than assumed.

Priced off the tables above, nothing hidden:

What is not in the price

• New artwork. The mod's original assets travel with the port at no extra cost. Textures or models drawn from scratch are quoted separately, because that is a different craft.
• Features that did not exist in the original. A port makes the mod run on the new target. Adding to it is commission work with its own quote.
• Hosting or publishing on your behalf. Public listings are yours to control, unless you ask me to handle it.
• Support past the correction window. Corrections against the written scope are included for thirty days. After that it is maintenance, and maintenance has its own line in the table above.

When you should not pay me at all

Three cases where this costs you nothing, and you should know them before you open a ticket.

• The mod already runs through a bridge. Sinytra Connector runs Fabric mods on Forge and NeoForge, including 1.20.1, and it is free. Try it first. I wrote up when it works and when it does not.
• The mod is built on Architectury. If the source tree already has a forge/src directory, most of the work you would be paying for is done. Usually that is a version bump more than a port, and often something you can finish yourself in an evening.
• You want to learn how. Everything I know about the failures that produce no error is written down for free: what breaks in a Fabric to Forge port and the crash no compiler can catch. If a weekend of your own time is cheaper than my invoice, spend the weekend.

When you do pay, what you are buying is somebody who has already hit the failures that build clean and break silently, and who checks for them before the jar leaves.

How to get a number you can trust

Whoever you hire, ask them three questions. They are cheap to ask and the answers separate people who have done this from people who are about to find out.

1. Which walls does this port cross? If the answer is not one of the four above, they have not looked at the version pair.
2. What is the licence, and where did you read it? The correct answer names the LICENSE file in the repository.
3. How will you know it works? Compiling is not evidence. The answer should involve the mod loaded in an actual game.

Written by danisansietev, Forge 1.20.1 mod porting. Last updated August 2026. Questions, corrections or a mod you need moved: open a ticket on my Discord.