DevThrottle uses prepaid credits: you top up when you choose (minimum $5), your balance draws down as you use hosted AI features at a published rate card, and nothing recurs. There is no subscription, credits never expire until used, and every action shows what it cost - to the cent. The app itself runs on your own machine and does not touch your balance at all. This post explains why we price it this way, because pricing is where a company tells you what it really thinks of you.
Why credits and not a subscription
A subscription charges you for a month whether you used it or not, and the business model quietly starts rooting for you to forget it exists. Prepaid credits invert that. You pay once, up front, for a balance that only moves when DevThrottle actually does AI work for you on our servers. If you take three weeks off, your balance sits there untouched. If a feature is not worth using, it costs you nothing. We only do well when you actually use the thing - which is exactly the incentive you should want your tools to have.
What credits actually pay for
A clean line separates free from paid. Everything that runs on your machines - the Director board, the background service, browser and phone access, unlimited agents - is free, because it costs us nothing when you use it. Credits pay for the work DevThrottle does with AI on your behalf on our servers. Today that is hosted transcription: talk to your agents by voice with zero setup, no AI account, no API key. One balance, one rate card - every hosted feature draws from the same prepaid credits at its published price. Prefer to bring your own transcription key? You can, and then nothing draws from your balance.
What $5 actually buys
The minimum top-up is $5, and for most developers that first $5 is more than a month of talking to your agents. That sounds like a stretch until you look at how dictation is actually used: short bursts - a task here, an answer there - adding up to minutes a day even across a full day of coding. In the usage we have measured so far, daily voice use takes well over a month to spend $5, and typical use takes several months.
The supporting math: hosted transcription is $0.20 per hour of audio, so $5 buys 25 hours of you talking. Metering is per second of audio with a ten-second minimum per request, and there is no charge for silence, for reading responses, or for time the app is simply open. You would need to dictate more than an hour every workday to spend $5 in a month.
Prices change loudly
Every price on the rate card carries an effective date, and every change gets a new effective date and a changelog entry on the same page. No silent repricing, ever. Two more rules bound what you will see there: only live, usable features get listed - nothing appears on the rate card before you can actually use it and it is actually billed - and we work to provide the cheapest possible tokens, so over time prices can go down. When they do, that will be a changelog entry too.
Every action shows its cost
Inside the app, every hosted action shows what it cost, to the cent, as it happens - and your balance is always visible in your account. Usage-based pricing has a bad reputation because of one failure mode: the surprise bill. Prepaid credits make that failure mode structurally impossible - you can never spend money you have not already loaded - and per-action costs remove even the small version of the surprise. You should never have to do forensic accounting to find out what a feature costs. It is on the screen when you use it.
What happens when the balance hits zero
Hosted features pause. That is the whole consequence. The app keeps working - your agents, your board, browser and phone access, all of it - because none of that ever depended on your balance. Top up again when you want the hosted features back, or do not. There is no account downgrade, no lockout, no expiry clock. Credits you buy stay yours until you use them.
Judge it in ten minutes
Pricing pages are claims; the meter running in front of you is evidence. Create a free account, download the Windows app, and get your first agent on the board in about ten minutes. When you are ready, add $5, talk to your agents instead of typing, and watch each action show its cost to the cent. If the numbers on this page do not match the numbers on your screen, we have failed - loudly, where you can see it.
Run your agents from one control room
DevThrottle orchestrates command-line coding agents across your machines. Your code never leaves.
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