Pricing · Verified 2026-08-10

Is Ollama free?

Yes. Running models on your own machine is free and has not changed. What costs money is Ollama Cloud, a separate hosted product with published subscription tiers, and that is what the "is Ollama still free" question is usually reacting to.

What costs nothing in Ollama

  • The Ollama app and CLI, running models locally on your own hardware.
  • Local inference with no per-token charge and no usage meter.
  • The local HTTP API, which is what most tools integrate against.
  • Commercial use of the local app. Ollama is MIT licensed, so this is a licensing question rather than a pricing one, and the licence is the thing to read rather than a tier table.

What Ollama charges for

Prices as Ollama 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.

TierPriceWhat it buys
Pro$20/mo or $200/yrLarger cloud models, three concurrent, more cloud usage than Free, private model upload.
Max$100/moThe top cloud tier. New sign-ups were paused when this was checked.
Team$25/seat/moCloud access for a team, five-seat minimum.
EnterpriseCustomCustom terms and support for larger organizations.

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, runs any GGUF model
  • Unlimited model downloads, multi-model switching
  • Local OpenAI-compatible API + embeddings
  • MCP host: install any MCP server and run its tools through ToolPiper
  • All speech: transcription, text-to-speech, voice cloning, dictation, voice chat
  • Talk to your Mac: spoken commands across 26 system domains
  • Local chat with tools, on any model you run
  • Apple Intelligence on the Neural Engine
  • Browser basics: connect to Chrome, snapshot a page, list tabs
  • Search Console reports: what your site already ranks for
  • Free companion apps (VisionPiper, AudioPiper, MediaPiper)

Where our own paid line sits

The first thing we charge for is Pro, at $10/mo. Nothing above is needed to run models, and nothing above gates anything in the list you just read.

  • Browser automation: act, fill, extract, record, intercept, assert and run Autopilot loops in Chrome
  • Files, Git and archives: the agent reads, edits, searches and commits
  • Clipboard cache tools: the agent reads and writes your clipboard history
  • Mac automation: the agent drives apps, types and clicks, arranges windows and Spaces, launches and stops processes, writes defaults and undoes
  • Local RAG over your files
  • Web scraping and YouTube transcripts
  • Screen and image analysis: screenshot, OCR, color pick, webcam, live stream and capture region controls
  • Image composition: import, fill, outpaint, free transform, perspective, gradients and text
  • Agent audio tools: record, transcribe and speak from a tool call
  • Cloud API proxy (bring your own keys)
  • Outreach toolkit: SEO tools (SERP capture with AI Overview detection, keyword discovery, rank check), Reddit and HN listening, content queue
  • API discovery toolkit + request replay
  • Save captured video streams to disk

Where Ollama is the better answer

  • Ollama is open source and ours is not. If auditability is your filter, that is a real difference and it favours them.
  • Ollama runs on Linux and Windows. We are macOS 26 and Apple Silicon only, which is a much higher floor.
  • For a headless server on a machine that is not a Mac, Ollama is the right answer and we are not a candidate.
  • Their model registry and one-line pull is a smoother way to fetch a model than ours.

Run it and check the list yourself

No account, no caps, no card. Everything in the free list above works on first launch.

Download ToolPiperSee every tier