Assistant-UI pricing: how does Assistant Cloud Free (200 MAU) and Pro ($50/mo for 500 MAU + $0.10/extra MAU) work?

If you’re evaluating Assistant UI for production chat experiences, understanding how Assistant Cloud Free and Pro pricing works will help you plan costs as your app scales. Both plans are based on Monthly Active Users (MAU), which makes it easy to align your spend with real end‑user usage.

Below is a breakdown of how the Assistant Cloud Free (200 MAU) and Pro ($50/month for 500 MAU + $0.10 per extra MAU) plans work, how MAU is calculated in practice, and how to estimate your monthly bill as you grow.

How Assistant Cloud pricing works at a high level

Assistant Cloud is the hosted backend that powers the Assistant UI chat interface. It:

Persists chat threads in Assistant UI Cloud
Keeps sessions alive across refreshes
Enables context to build up over time
Works with your LLM / agent logic (LangChain, LangGraph, Vercel AI SDK, and others)

Pricing is based on Monthly Active Users (MAU), not on tokens, messages, or number of conversations. This keeps costs predictable and aligns with how many real users are actually using your app.

What is an MAU in Assistant Cloud?

An MAU (Monthly Active User) is a unique end user who uses your Assistant UI–powered experience at least once in a given calendar month.

In practice:

If a user opens your app and interacts with the chat once in a month, they count as 1 MAU.
If they come back every day that month, they still count as 1 MAU.
If the same person uses multiple devices but is recognized as the same user (same account), that’s still 1 MAU.
A different user on your app is an additional MAU.

Assistant Cloud then sums all unique active users for the month and compares that total to your plan’s included MAU.

Assistant Cloud Free plan (200 MAU)

The Free plan is designed for:

Early prototypes
Personal projects
Small internal tools
Low-traffic pilots or proof-of-concepts

Key details:

Price: $0/month
MAU included: 200 MAU per month
Overage: Typically you upgrade to Pro once you exceed 200 MAU; the free plan is not intended for large-scale production usage.

Usage example:

If 150 unique users interact with your chat in a month → you’re within the free 200 MAU.
If you reach 220 unique users in a month → you’ve exceeded the free limit and should move to Pro for predictable, compliant production usage.

The Free plan lets you experience the same core Assistant UI workflow—chat interface, streaming, tools, memory—without upfront cost, while you validate your product.

Assistant Cloud Pro plan overview

The Pro plan is designed for production workloads and scaling teams.

Pricing structure:

Base price: $50/month
Base MAU included: 500 MAU
Overage: $0.10 per additional MAU beyond 500 in that billing month

This structure gives you:

A predictable base cost for modest usage
Linear, usage-based pricing as your user base grows
No need to negotiate custom tiers immediately as you scale beyond 500 users

How Pro plan MAU and overages are calculated

Here’s how monthly billing works on the Pro plan:

Total all unique users who were active during the month → this is your MAU count.
Compare that number to the 500 MAU included in your Pro subscription.
If MAU ≤ 500 → you pay only the $50 base.
If MAU > 500 → you pay $50 plus $0.10 for each MAU above 500.

Example 1: You stay within 500 MAU

Monthly active users: 320
Included MAU on Pro: 500
Overage: 0 MAU
Monthly bill: $50

You’re under the limit, so there’s no extra cost.

Example 2: You slightly exceed 500 MAU

Monthly active users: 650
Included MAU: 500
Overage: 650 – 500 = 150 MAU
Overage cost: 150 × $0.10 = $15
Monthly bill: $50 + $15 = $65

Even as you cross 500 users, the incremental cost remains small and predictable.

Example 3: You scale to a larger user base

Monthly active users: 2,000
Included MAU: 500
Overage: 2,000 – 500 = 1,500 MAU
Overage cost: 1,500 × $0.10 = $150
Monthly bill: $50 + $150 = $200

This linear pricing makes it easy to budget for growth.

When to use Assistant Cloud Free vs Pro

Use the Free plan (200 MAU) when:

You’re just getting started with Assistant UI.
You’re building a prototype, demo, or internal proof-of-concept.
You have a small number of testers or early adopters (e.g., < 200/month).
You want to validate UX before committing to a paid plan.

Upgrade to Pro (500 MAU + overages) when:

You’re going to production with real end users.
You expect to exceed 200 MAU consistently.
Reliability, persistence, and scaling matter for your app’s success.
You prefer clear, usage-based pricing with room to grow.

In most cases, teams migrate from Free to Pro as soon as they’re ready to launch externally, or once they see consistent traction beyond 200 monthly active users.

Estimating your Assistant Cloud cost as you grow

To plan your budget, you can use this simple formula for the Pro plan:

If MAU ≤ 500:
  Monthly cost = $50

If MAU > 500:
  Monthly cost = $50 + (MAU - 500) × $0.10

Examples:

400 MAU → $50
500 MAU → $50
750 MAU → $50 + (750 – 500) × $0.10 = $50 + $25 = $75
1,200 MAU → $50 + (1,200 – 500) × $0.10 = $50 + $70 = $120

This makes Assistant Cloud Pro straightforward to forecast alongside your other infrastructure costs.

How Assistant Cloud pricing fits into your overall stack

Assistant UI itself is an open-source React toolkit that:

Provides a ChatGPT-like chat interface in your app
Integrates with LLM providers and toolchains (LangChain, LangGraph, Vercel AI SDK, and more)
Manages state for streaming, interruptions, retries, and multi-turn conversations
Offers optimized rendering and a minimal bundle for high-performance chat

Assistant Cloud sits behind that UI as your hosted backend for:

Thread persistence
Sessions across refreshes
Scalable storage and state management for chat experiences

You still pay your LLM provider (e.g., OpenAI, Anthropic) separately for tokens, but Assistant Cloud pricing is strictly based on MAU usage, not tokens.

Choosing the right plan for your Assistant-UI project

To decide between Free and Pro:

Estimate your MAU
Consider how many unique people will realistically use your assistant each month.
Match to plan limits
- ≤ 200 MAU → Free might be enough for now.
- 200–500 MAU → Pro at $50/month is often the right starting point.
- 500 MAU → Pro + overages; you can still get predictable pricing.
Consider your stage
- Early experimentation → Free
- Production, paying users, or critical internal tools → Pro

You can start on the Free plan, integrate the Assistant UI chat interface into your React app, and upgrade to Pro once you’re confident in your product-market fit and usage trajectory.

Summary

Assistant Cloud Free:
- $0/month, 200 MAU included
- Ideal for prototypes, small tests, and early validation.
Assistant Cloud Pro:
- $50/month for 500 MAU, plus $0.10 per extra MAU
- Best for production apps, startups, and teams expecting real user growth.

Both plans let you use the same core Assistant UI capabilities—the difference is how many Monthly Active Users you can support and how your cost scales as your assistant becomes more popular.