What is Elethor built with?
Learn about how Elethor was made, challenges it faced, and key facts and history.
Elethor is an idle PBBG that was first launched in early 2021.
It took an estimated 2-2.5 years of development until there was a playable public version1.
Who owns/operates it?
Elethor is owned by Cardboard Machete2 which consists of Caleb Anthony3 (also known by the Zaalah moniker) as the sole owner and developer.
How much money does it make?
It has not been shared how much it makes, however, owner Caleb has previously described it as earning revenue, but not enough to replace his full-time job.
What languages does it use?
Elethor uses HTML, CSS, and Javascript for the frontend and uses PHP and a Postgres4 database for the backend.
What tooling does it use?
On the backend, it uses Laravel and uses Laravel Horizon to handle scheduling5 and Redis6 for caching.
How much does it cost to run?
Elethor costs approximately 500 USD per month7 in server costs to cover approximately 700 active players, as described in the most recently known costings posted by Caleb.
Where does it get graphics from?
In a June 2025 interview, Caleb described the artwork for Elethor as having been primarily sourced1 from game-icons.net including artwork such as the ship icons.
Caleb noted that he can't do art for anything
and that he hoped that AI would get good enough to help make the process easier.
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"I had an issue a couple weeks ago with Postgres PDO seeing booleans as integers which totally broke my DB integration."- Caleb Anthony via Discord at ↩
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"And caching is a painful thing to diagnose. I cache a lot but there's stuff cached closer to the database, in a designated Redis instance, and then in a local Redis instance, depending on how often I need to use it and how often it might expire."- Caleb Anthony via Discord at ↩
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"I pay like $500/mo for Elethor servers."- Caleb Anthony via Discord at ↩