aardvark is free and open. Paid plans add managed hosting, seats, support, and a monthly included-AI allowance metered in real dollars — never opaque credits.
aardvark is free and open: author, build, and self-host your docs at no cost, forever. Paid plans are for teams that want a predictable monthly bill — managed hosting, more seats, real support, and a monthly included-AI allowance in dollars, keeping pricing simple and dollar-based. Your aardvark key also grants you access to hundreds of AI models you can use strategically to control costs as you go.
$0 — pay as you go
Bring your own hosting, pay only for the AI you use.
- Self-host anywhere, full feature set
- All components, themes, agent discovery
- Metered AI at published per-model prices
- Prepaid balance + auto top-up
- 1 seat · community support
$99 per month $87.20/mo billed annually
We host and run your docs.
- Managed hosting — custom domain, SSL, previews
- $40/mo of AI included, at a ≈7% member discount
- 5 seats included, add more at $10/seat
- Insights analytics
- Community support
$349 per month $303.20/mo billed annually
Robust and self-serve — no sales call.
- Everything in Pro, plus:
- $120/mo of AI included — 3× Pro — at a ≈13% discount
- 12 seats included, add more at $15/seat
- SSO, RBAC, audit-log export
- Priority email support, next-business-day target
$2,750 per month
Everything in Business, plus:
- $750/mo of AI included — 18.75× Pro — at a 20% discount
- Unlimited customization requests — our engineering team on call to build any feature you need
- SSO + SCIM provisioning
- Unlimited seats
- Shared Slack access for realtime support and requests, 7 days a week
$0 — pay as you go
Bring your own hosting, pay only for the AI you use.
- Self-host anywhere, full feature set
- All components, themes, agent discovery
- Metered AI at published per-model prices
- Prepaid balance + auto top-up
- 1 seat · community support
$99 per month $87.20/mo billed annually
We host and run your docs.
- Managed hosting — custom domain, SSL, previews
- $40/mo of AI included, at a ≈7% member discount
- 5 seats included, add more at $10/seat
- Insights analytics
- Community support
$349 per month $303.20/mo billed annually
Robust and self-serve — no sales call.
- Everything in Pro, plus:
- $120/mo of AI included — 3× Pro — at a ≈13% discount
- 12 seats included, add more at $15/seat
- SSO, RBAC, audit-log export
- Priority email support, next-business-day target
$2,750 per month
Everything in Business, plus:
- $750/mo of AI included — 18.75× Pro — at a 20% discount
- Unlimited customization requests — our engineering team on call to build any feature you need
- SSO + SCIM provisioning
- Unlimited seats
- Shared Slack access for realtime support and requests, 7 days a week
Every model’s real cost per answer, on every plan: the pricing table.
Compare plans
| Free | Pro | Business | Enterprise | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Price | $0 | $99/mo | $349/mo | $2,750/mo |
| Billed annually | — | $1,046.40/yr (≈$87.20/mo) | $3,638.40/yr (≈$303.20/mo) | $28,200/yr (≈$2,350/mo) |
| Included AI every month (member discount) | — | $40 at ≈7% off | $120 at ≈13% off (3× Pro) | $750 at 20% off (18.75× Pro) |
| Seats | 1 | 5 | 12 | Unlimited |
| Hosting | Self-host only | Managed or self-hosted | Managed or self-hosted | Managed or self-hosted |
| Analytics | Basic | Insights | Insights + export | Insights + export |
| SSO / RBAC / audit export | — | — | Included | + SCIM |
| Customization | — | — | — | Unlimited requests |
| Support | Community | Community | Priority email | Realtime shared Slack |
| Self-hosting, agent discovery, PDF, all components | Included | Included | Included | Included |
Nothing core is paywalled: self-hosting, Markdown-for-Agents, llms.txt, the agent-skills
index, whole-site PDF, and every component and theme ship on Free. Paid plans add
hosting, seats, support, controls — and cheaper AI.
The honest AI meter
Every competitor meters AI in credits you can’t reason about. aardvark bills AI in dollars: the pricing table publishes what every model costs per answer on every plan — real figures, no conversion math. Subscribers pay less per metered dollar the more they commit (≈7% off on Pro, ≈13% on Business, 20% on Enterprise), on top of the allowance their plan includes. All of it runs on aardvark’s managed keys — you never create, rotate, or secure a model-provider key on any plan.
Your included allowance is denominated in those same billed dollars:
- The dashboard shows dollars included, dollars used, your own trailing burn rate, and an estimated depletion date — no “≈N answers” marketing math.
- Unused allowance rolls over one month, up to 2× your monthly amount.
- Answers served by
:freemodels never bill and never touch your allowance.
When the included AI runs out
Cap-and-hold is the default. Paid AI pauses at your cap and you’re notified — so your worst-case bill for metered AI is the subscription price. (Usage-based GitHub Automations compute, if you use it, draws your prepaid balance separately and isn’t included in that figure.) Prefer to stay unstuck? Two self-serve options, both under your control:
Annual billing
Annual plans take 20% off the platform fee — the included-AI allowance is funded monthly at full value either way (it’s real usage, not a discountable line item), so the effective saving is about 12–13% off the yearly total — ~12% on Pro, ~13% on Business (the bigger a plan’s fee is relative to its bundled allowance, the more of the bill the discount reaches). Pro: $1,046.40/yr (vs. $1,188 at par, ~12% off). Business: $3,638.40/yr (vs. $4,188, ~13% off). The allowance still resets every month on annual plans.
FAQ
Billing is designed to be predictable and never to surprise you. Here’s exactly what happens in the situations people ask about most.
Your included AI
The billed cost of metered requests — the same number the dashboard meter and your usage ledger show, measured in real dollars, not opaque credits. It pools across your whole account and drains before your prepaid balance.
By default, paid AI pauses for the rest of the month and readers automatically fall back to free models — so you’re never charged a surprise overage. It resets on your next monthly date. If you’d rather keep paid AI running past your allowance, turn on pay-as-you-go overflow (below).
Yes, up to one month’s worth. Anything beyond that doesn’t keep stacking, so your allowance plus rollover never exceeds about two months at once — a deliberate cap so a quiet period can’t build into an unexpectedly large bank.
In order: any rolled-over allowance first (it’s the oldest and expires soonest), then this month’s allowance, and only then — if you’ve turned on pay-as-you-go overflow — your prepaid balance. Your balance is never touched unless you opt in.
Going past your included AI (overflow)
Three, and you can switch anytime on the Billing page:
- Cap-and-hold (default) — paid AI pauses; readers keep getting free-model answers. Your bill for the month can never exceed your plan fee.
- Pay-as-you-go — paid AI keeps running past your allowance, drawing your prepaid balance at your plan’s member rate, up to a monthly cap you set.
- Shutoff — all AI stops (including free models) until next month’s allowance arrives.
It’s a guardrail against a surprise bill. Setting a cap far above your included allowance is a deliberate choice, so we ask you to acknowledge it once rather than let a large overage happen silently.
No. Once you’ve acknowledged it, it stays acknowledged; later cap changes don’t prompt you again.
Changing or cancelling your plan
Upgrades apply right away, with the difference prorated onto your next invoice. Downgrades and cancellations take effect at your next billing date — you keep everything you paid for until then, and nothing is prorated. Unused prepaid balance is always yours either way.
No. You keep the price you signed up at for as long as you stay on that plan. If we later change our published pricing, your live subscription isn’t moved — the price you agreed to is the price you pay.
Just switch back to your current plan before your next renewal. You stay exactly where you were, at your original price — even if our catalog prices happened to change in the meantime. Undoing a scheduled downgrade never quietly re-prices you.
Your plan stays active until the end of the period you’ve already paid for, then the account returns to Free pay-as-you-go. You can resume anytime before then and nothing changes. Your prepaid balance is untouched. (An operator-provisioned Enterprise/comped plan ends immediately instead, with no scheduled end date.)
Payments, balance, and safety limits
With cap-and-hold, your plan fee — full stop. With pay-as-you-go, your plan fee plus the overflow cap you set. Your dashboard shows this “max possible bill” figure directly. (Usage-based build/compute, if you use it, draws your prepaid balance separately and isn’t part of that number.)
It’s always yours. Cancelling, downgrading, or a lapsed subscription payment never spends or absorbs your prepaid balance — it’s kept completely separate from your plan.
You get a grace period of about two weeks with automatic retries before the plan lapses to Free — and, again, your prepaid balance is never used to cover it.
An automatic safety brake noticed spending far above your account’s normal pattern and paused paid AI to protect you from a runaway bill. It isn’t a funds problem — one click on the Billing page resumes it.
It stops within roughly one request’s cost of your limit, not to the exact cent — the final request is admitted while you’re still in the black and then billed. If you need a hard ceiling, keep a small buffer.
We cap how many paid requests run at once per account to keep spending predictable. Extra concurrent requests get a brief “try again in a moment” and succeed on retry; free-model requests aren’t limited this way.
Optional. With a card on file, we automatically refill your prepaid balance when it runs low — so free-tier and pay-as-you-go usage aren’t interrupted. You choose the amount and can turn it off anytime.
Yes. Removing it also detaches it from your subscription’s billing, so nothing keeps charging a card you’ve taken off.
Plans, seats, and hosting
No — on every plan, all metered AI runs through aardvark’s managed keys. You never create, rotate, or secure a provider key, and there is no bring-your-own-key tier to manage.
Seats cover editors and admins — the people who create and manage your docs. Readers are always free and unlimited on every plan. Each plan includes a set number of seats (Free 1, Pro 5, Business 12, Enterprise unlimited), and on Pro and Business you can buy add-on seats when you need more: $10/seat/mo on Pro, $15/seat/mo on Business (annual plans bill seats at 12× the monthly rate, so the yearly total matches the monthly one).
Your bill never grows on its own — it’s block-and-buy. When every seat is taken, new invites are simply blocked until you make room, and nothing is charged and no one loses access until you decide to add seats. To fit another teammate you either buy add-on seats or remove a member or pending invite on the Team tab. (On an operator-provisioned or contract plan, seats are arranged through support rather than self-serve.)
From Billing → Seats. Adding seats raises your limit immediately and prorates the cost onto your next invoice, so you only pay for the part of the period you actually use them. Removing seats posts a proration credit to your next invoice — first drop the members or pending invites you no longer need on the Team tab (we won’t let you reduce below the seats currently in use), then lower the count. Everyone already on your team keeps their access either way.
They come with you. On an upgrade your add-on seats move to the new plan’s per-seat rate right away (prorated onto your next invoice, like the plan change itself); on a downgrade they switch over at your next renewal. If you move to a plan that doesn’t sell add-on seats, the add-ons are removed at that point and you stop being billed for them — the people over the new limit keep their access, you just can’t invite past it until you’re back under.
Yes. Managed hosting is included, never required.
The discount applies to the platform fee; your included-AI allowance is funded at full value every month either way (it’s real usage, not a discountable line item). The allowance still resets monthly on annual plans.
Enterprise works two ways. You can subscribe to it self-serve at the published price, just like Pro or Business, with the saved card on your dashboard. Or, for a signed contract with a negotiated allowance, seats, and member rate, we can provision it out of band — billed separately, with no card on file for the plan, and your dashboard reflecting your contract terms. Either way your “max possible bill” is shown for the plan you’re on.