---
title: "Is Ollama Free? What Costs Money and What Does Not"
description: "Running Ollama locally is free. Ollama Cloud is a paid product with published tiers. Here is the split, checked against their pricing page."
canonical: "https://modelpiper.com/compare/is-ollama-free"
---

# Is Ollama Free? What Costs Money and What Does Not

> Running Ollama locally is free. Ollama Cloud is a paid product with published tiers. Here is the split, checked against their pricing page.

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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.

| Tier | Price | What it buys |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Pro | $20/mo or $200/yr | Larger cloud models, three concurrent, more cloud usage than Free, private model upload. |
| Max | $100/mo | The top cloud tier. New sign-ups were paused when this was checked. |
| Team | $25/seat/mo | Cloud access for a team, five-seat minimum. |
| Enterprise | Custom | Custom 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 — 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
-   Visual pipeline builder
-   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.

-   Local RAG over your files
-   Web scraping and YouTube transcripts
-   Cloud API proxy (bring your own keys)

## 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.

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