News

Hey everyone, Jai here!

I know this news comes as a surprise, so I wanted to talk through why we think it’s right for Modrinth and what it means for us.

My journey with Modrinth

I made my first Minecraft mod when I was nine. It was a little tech mod called Mine-Tech that I uploaded to the Minecraft Forums. I got into modding because I watched PopularMMOs after school every day and wanted to make something cool enough to show up in one of his videos. That never happened, but it's what got me coding.

I spent most of my teenage years bouncing around Minecraft: working on servers, joining modding teams, making a dinosaur mod called Prehistoric Eclipse that somehow got hundreds of thousands of downloads. Minecraft modding is genuinely how I learned to program.

In 2020, COVID hit and I found myself with a lot of time on my hands. The platforms were still bad. Search was broken, creators were an afterthought, and nothing had really improved in years. So I started building a search engine that indexed mods from other platforms. They quickly shut us down for scraping (fair enough), and at that point I asked myself, “why not just build the whole platform from scratch?”

I open-sourced it, and people actually showed up to help build it with me. That's how Modrinth really started, as a thing I was building that other people wanted to exist too.

Over the next year and a half, I kept working on it, mostly during school, sometimes instead of school. Listening to creators, shipping features, fixing things that broke. By 2022 we had a million monthly visitors and my hobby project was taking over my life. I dropped out of high school to work on Modrinth full time. I raised money, hired a team, and moved to New York. We launched creator monetization, the Modrinth App, analytics, and more.

The site was growing like crazy, but we also accumulated a lot of technical debt and made a lot of mistakes along the way. In early 2024, I returned $800k to our investors because the venture path wasn't right for us. That was painful, but the right thing to do.

What brought me here

Since then, I decided to go to college. I initially thought I could keep running Modrinth day-to-day, but school quickly started to absorb my life, and I found myself wanting to spend more time learning in classes and being involved in the campus community than doing things for Modrinth.

I hired Josh to help manage the team and as he excelled at every responsibility I gave him (and honestly did some things way better than I ever could), he quickly evolved into running the entire team day-to-day.

Through his leadership, we shipped new creator withdrawal options, server projects, and many app improvements and fixes. We’ve also taken Modrinth Hosting fully in-house, bringing more stability to the platform and expanding into new regions around the world.

But, there were still problems, mostly stemming from me not being committed or involved. I would take forever to do basic responsibilities, from hiring new content moderators and updating our very outdated legal documents, to giving feedback on new features we were releasing. I felt like I was doing a disservice to the community and the team by not being a present leader.

On top of that, Modrinth has been struggling from a lack of resources in ways that are starting to show. Content review wait times, website instability, API tech debt, and an increasing amount of bugs we hardly have time to keep up with. Things that we simply need more attention and resources to fix.

I started looking for someone new to support Josh and the team.

It wasn’t hard to find someone who wanted to buy Modrinth, but I was not interested in selling to some company that doesn’t care about the game and the community as much as we do. That’s what led me to Raf and Flo, the founders of Spark Universe.

Why Spark?

I know what some of you are thinking. Spark Universe, are they really the right people for Modrinth and do they actually care about this community?

I first met Raf and Flo in 2023. We were talking about integrating a mod browser into Essential Mod. They asked how they could contribute to creator payouts for every mod downloaded through their integration. Nobody had ever asked that question before, not even once, and that really stuck with me.

Across everything that Spark has made, you can tell that a lot of skill and craft was involved. I've always looked up to their design ethos and consistent quality in everything they make.

On Bedrock, Spark has created amazing content like RealismCraft and the recently announced Aether Legends in partnership with the original mod authors. On Java, Spark have built the Essential Mod, which makes playing with friends easier, and introduced free peer-to-peer hosting to the community over 4 years ago.

I know some people really don't like Essential. And while I think it's very cool what they’ve brought to Minecraft, and how they’ve built a modding team that pays all of its team livable salaries, it's fine if you still don't like them after this. Modrinth will stay an independent team and project, and there are no plans to ever merge the two.

When I visited the Spark team last year, I met over 50 people in person and saw for myself how much passion they have for creating in Minecraft. These people have done it all: Builds, mini-games, servers, texture packs, add-ons, mods, YT shows, animations, and more. Many of them have been creating in Minecraft for over 10 years.

If Modrinth was ever going to have a new home, it had to be with people who get it because they've lived it.

I know this is hard to hear

I know some of you will find this news disappointing: I understand. Modrinth is the independent community-first alternative and joining another company sounds scary.

I truly believe that this was the best thing to do, but I’m not asking for your blind trust. Watch what happens, hold us accountable, and give the team at Spark Universe the chance to show you who they are. They know they have to earn your trust. They’re ready to do that work.

What's not changing

It is a cliche that companies, upon acquisition, will say that nothing is going to change. And it always does. Modrinth will change, because it's not perfect. But our mission and values will not.

• Our mission stays the same. A transparent, creator-first modding platform. We are building the best place to share and grow your mods.

• Modrinth stays open source. Our code is available for anyone to use, adapt, and contribute to. It’s core to our mission and Spark will not be changing that.

• We are not merging with Essential. Modrinth and Essential have unique areas of focus and independent teams. Essential will never be automatically installed to your instances or favored when browsing for mods.

• The team isn't going anywhere. Modrinth continues to be built by the same people. Josh stays leading the team. Raf and Flo are here to support our team, not to have someone from Spark run Modrinth.

• I'll still be around too. I will continue to help the team with making Modrinth better. I'm still in all of our team channels, giving input on various things, and helping behind the scenes to make Modrinth better and better!

How Spark is helping

The acquisition closed back in February. Raf and Flo have spent a lot of time getting more familiar with how the Modrinth team and the platform operate, and have been helping us already.

• Growing the team. Modrinth has been growing so much that we’ve definitely felt stretch thin. Spark is helping us expand the team in content review, support and engineering so we can resolve some of these growing pains.

• Supporting team members. Currently a lot of the team are contractors because employing a global and remote team is really hard. Spark will help us offer employment and benefits to the team! Everyone has poured a lot of love into Modrinth so its awesome to support them further.

• Continuing our vision. Spark is here to help us do more of what we’re already doing. Building a creator-first modding platform together with the community. We want to be the best place to share and grow your mods.

Thank you everyone!

I've been working on Modrinth since I was thirteen. It started as a side project and turned into something that tens of millions of people use. That still feels surreal.

Thank you to every creator who has published their work here. Thank you to all the players who find their mods on Modrinth! To everyone who's contributed code, reported bugs, translated the site, shared Modrinth with friends, or just hung out in the Discord: This has always been a community project and it always will be.

Watch, stay involved, and keep holding us to the standard you deserve.

— Jai, Founder of Modrinth