What is free
Everything that runs on your machine is free forever and needs no account: the local CLI, rendering on your machine, autopilot with your own topics and keys, and the local dashboard. That includes projects, scenes, shader transitions, the quality checks, and the background worker. Free features never use credits.What is paid
Paid features run on vfrey’s server, because they use outside data or cloud machines: Topics, Creators, Ingest, Mail, cloud sync and storage, and cloud rendering (Teams and cloud). vfrey does not scrape. It reads data through providers and the official YouTube API. Every plan can use every paid feature, and credits are what limit you. The one exception is sending Mail, which needs a paid plan or a credit top-up so that vfrey’s sending domain keeps its reputation.Plans
Prices are in US dollars. One credit is worth about one cent.
Annual plans are billed once a year at the lower monthly rate, for example $180 a year for Solo.
Seats
Each plan includes some seats. Extra seats cost $20 a seat a month and share the org’s credit pool. Viewer and reviewer or approver roles are free and never count as seats.Credits
A credit pays for a unit of server-side work. These are the prices:
Some smaller actions are priced separately: a creator search that reads only the index is 1 credit, breakout alerts are 2, a watchlist CSV export is 5, and requesting a new Topics niche is 25. Drafting mail costs no credits.
Not charged: a failed provider call, and a result that was already cached, cost 0 credits. Remote MCP calls are free, except that they spend the credits of whatever paid action they trigger. A refused call is not charged.
What a month of credits gets you
Each line spends the whole month on one thing. Counts are rounded.
A realistic mix on Solo is about 100 topic searches, 165 creator lookups, 300 emails and 70 minutes of render.
Rollover
Plan credits renew each month (UTC). Unused plan credits carry over one month, capped at one month’s amount. If you use 500 of Solo’s 2,000, the 1,500 left is still there next month, on top of the new 2,000. What is left at the end of that second month expires. Spending uses the credits that will expire soonest first, so the carried credits go first.Top-ups
Buy more any time on your billing page. The minimum is $10.
Top-up credits never expire. They are spent after your plan credits. The free signup credits do not expire either. Used credits are not refunded. See the refund policy and the terms.
npx vfrey whoami shows your balance and how many credits expire soon.
When something runs out
Each refusal prints a✗ line and a Fix: line. See Troubleshooting for each one.
The one
plan_required left is sending Mail from a Free account that has never bought a top-up. Mail goes out from vfrey’s own domain, so it needs a paid plan or a top-up. Drafting is free. Every other paid feature only needs credits.
Your account
npx vfrey login, logout, and whoami are on the Account page.