Yes for running models on your own Mac, and that has not changed. What is new is a metered cloud tier beside the free local one, billed per million tokens, so "free" is now the answer about the local app rather than about the whole product.
What costs nothing in LM Studio
The desktop app, free for home and work use.
Running local models through its llama.cpp and MLX engines.
LM Link for up to five devices.
Web search with zero data retention.
What LM Studio charges for
Prices as LM Studio publishes them, checked on 2026-08-10. Vendors change pricing without notice, so treat this as a dated reading and check their page before you buy.
Tier
Price
What it buys
Pay as you go
$0.13 to $3.00 per million input tokens
Cloud inference credits. Output is billed separately and runs from $0.26 to $15.00 per million tokens depending on the model.
Bionic Pass
Not published
Their own pages say pricing and plan details are coming soon, so there is nothing to compare yet.
What costs nothing here
The whole native runner is the free tier. No account, no caps, no terminal. This list is read straight from the pricing catalog this site bills from, so it cannot drift from what you actually get.
Native llama.cpp engine — run any GGUF model
Unlimited model downloads, multi-model switching
Local OpenAI-compatible API + embeddings
MCP server with 358 free tools
All speech: transcription, text-to-speech, voice cloning, dictation
Chat with bundled model
Apple Intelligence on the Neural Engine
Full browser automation, vision, and system control