Is Vellum free? What an open-source alternative costs to self-host

What Vellum gives away, and what its cloud charges for

Vellum is a personal AI assistant that Vellum says is free to download and start. On the free path you run the assistant yourself, on your own hardware, a VPS, or a private cloud, and Vellum's own pricing page lists no platform fee and no computer-tier charge on that path. Vellum Cloud is the paid path. That same page names three packages: Mighty at $30 a month, Super at $100 a month, and Ultra at $200 a month, each bundling a machine, storage, and a monthly usage allowance. Past the allowance, Vellum bills in credits, where the company prices $1 as 1 credit.

What an open-source system your team owns costs to run

Kortix is the open-source AI Operating System: your agents, their skills, your company memory, and every connector in one git repo you own. The Kortix price line reads, "Free is $0 with 200 credits per month and 1 project. The team plan is $40 per seat per month with 2,500 credits per month per seat, pooled." Self-host is free, so a team can run the whole platform on its own network and pay only its own model and compute bills. The self-hosting guide covers the free path, and what Vellum costs sets the two shapes beside each other.

Which shape fits one assistant or a whole team

Vellum prices one assistant. A Vellum Cloud package covers a single assistant, and its usage allowance and credits draw on that one assistant's work. Kortix prices a team. Each seat adds a person and carries pooled credits the whole team draws on, and the free tier is one project with 200 credits a month for sandbox compute. A team that wants its agents, skills, memory, and connectors in one repo it owns self-hosts Kortix at no platform fee. Vellum's figures come from its own site, checked October 2026.