Bring your own API key: what building with Adrian actually costs
Pricing pages are written to make one option look obvious. This is the version without that pressure: three ways to run Adrian, what each genuinely costs, and which one to start on.
The three ways to pay
- Local models through Ollama — free. No account, no key, no bill. How that works in practice.
- Your own API key — you pay your provider directly, at their rates. Adrian takes no cut and adds no markup.
- Hosted Adrian Agents — a monthly subscription (Pro, Max or Ultra) with an allowance of Adrian Credits included.
The first two are the free desktop app. There is no trial timer on them and no feature that unlocks only if you subscribe to something.
BYOK: you pay the provider, and only the provider
Bring your own key and Adrian is a client for a model you already pay for. Paste a key from a supported provider and your usage is billed by them, on their pricing, to your account. Nothing is proxied through us and no percentage is skimmed on the way past.
The honest catch is that a provider bill is variable by nature. A long debugging session on an expensive model costs what it costs, and the meter you are watching is theirs, not ours. If a predictable monthly number matters more to you than a low one, that is the argument for a plan rather than a key.
Local: free, paid for in hardware and patience
Running through Ollama costs nothing per build, forever. What it costs instead is machine capability. On a workstation with a decent GPU this is the best deal in the list. On a thin laptop it is slow enough that you will feel it on every iteration — free, but not costless.
Hosted Adrian Agents
Paid plans meter hosted agent usage in Adrian Credits, shown as an allowance bar in the app. Every plan has a monthly allowance sized so you always know where you stand, and you can cancel at any time. The pricing page has the current numbers, and subscriptions are processed by Paddle.com, our Merchant of Record.
Which one to start on
Start on the free desktop app. If you already hold a provider key, use it — you will get frontier-model quality at exactly the price you already pay. If you do not, and your machine can hold a reasonable model, start local and find out how far the build system carries a small model before you spend anything at all. Move to a plan when you have decided Adrian is worth a monthly line item, not before.