08 · Cost, plans, and teams
The headline first: the app is free forever, Apache-2.0. The models cost money.
On top of that sits an optional managed service selling "you don't manage keys" plus cloud deploys. It isn't a prerequisite for using OpenDesign.
Free
| Price | $0, forever |
| License | Apache-2.0, source on GitHub |
| Models | BYOK — your key, billed to your provider account, never proxied |
| Runs | Locally, macOS and Windows |
| Includes | The full skill and system library, every agent adapter, artifacts in your own repo |
For most individuals this is the tier. Especially if you already pay for Claude Code or Codex — design and coding draw on the same pool, so the marginal cost is near zero.
Managed tiers
You're buying convenience: no key management, a bundled model allowance, and cloud deploys.
| Tier | Monthly | Yearly | Model credits | Cloud deploys |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Plus | $20 | $168 | $20 / mo | 3 / mo |
| Pro | $100 | $720 | $120 / mo | 20 / mo |
| Max | $200 | $1,176 | $300 / mo | 50 / mo |
Deploys beyond the allowance are $2 each.
Note that Pro and Max include more credit than they cost ($100 buys $120; $200 buys $300). So if your usage is already at that level, the managed tier is slightly cheaper than buying API access yourself. At low usage, free plus your own key wins.
Teams
| Tier | Standard / seat / mo | Model credits | Minimum seats |
|---|---|---|---|
| Team Basic | $5 | none | 3 |
| Team Plus | $25 | $20 / seat / mo | 3 |
| Team Pro | $105 | $100 / seat / mo | 3 |
| Team Max | $205 | $200 / seat / mo | 3 |
Each has carried an intro price at various points (Team Pro at $73.50, for instance). Check the live page.
Team Basic is the interesting one: no model credits at all. It sells collaboration and nothing else — shared projects, shared design systems, shared plugins. That fits a team where everyone already has their own agent subscription and what's missing is a common set of brand assets and methods. It's often the most practical tier in the list.
Enterprise
Custom, covering shared team design systems, real-time collaboration, multi-user project and artifact editing, unified billing and usage, SSO / SAML, and priority support. Contact is support@open-design.ai.
Prices change
These numbers come from the machine-readable pricing page, open-design.ai/pricing.md. Promotional and annual pricing move often — check the live page before signing anything.
Containing the spend
Whatever tier you're on:
One: the front of the workflow is free. Steps 0 through 2 — purpose, style, structure — burn almost no generation credit. Thinking first is cheaper than regenerating later.
Two: don't regenerate to fix details. One word is an Edit, at effectively zero cost. Regenerating a page is the most expensive operation available.
Three: refine in narrow passes. Ask for seven dimensions at once and it rewrites everything, and you have to re-review all of it. One or two at a time keeps changes checkable.
Four: images and video dominate the bill. Generation and rendering there cost far more than text. Approve one image before batching.
Five: freeze stable work as skills. Skills remove rounds of clarification, which is where the long-term saving is.
Organising a team
A structure that works:
team-design/
├── design-systems/
│ ├── our-brand/DESIGN.md
│ ├── client-a/DESIGN.md
│ └── client-b/DESIGN.md
├── skills/
│ ├── monthly-report/SKILL.md
│ ├── feature-launch-deck/SKILL.md
│ └── client-proposal/SKILL.md
└── artifacts/
└── 2026-09/Three things live in the repo: brand systems, method (skills), and artifacts. Everyone brings their own agent subscription; what's shared is the repo.
This runs on the free tier with nothing but git. A Team plan buys the in-product collaboration experience — live co-editing, unified usage — not this structure.
A question that comes up constantly
"Can we skip the desktop app and just use it in the cloud?"
Not today. OpenDesign is local-first by design, and the minimum is a local daemon plus an agent. The project's own answer is blunt: a hosted sandbox is on the roadmap but not the priority, because artifacts in your repo beat documents in someone else's database.
Self-hosting is fine — the daemon runs anywhere Node 24 runs. Teams doing a shared deployment usually pin the daemon to a machine inside their network and point each developer's CLI at it.
Related
- Get started / Connect your agent — the two BYOK routes
- 06 · Export — where the cloud-deploy allowance gets used
- Official pricing: open-design.ai/pricing