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Self-Host vs Cloud: AgentBurn's Open-Core Model Explained

AgentBurn is MIT-licensed at its core. Learn when to self-host for free and when the hosted Pro tier makes sense for your team.

AgentBurn is open-core: the cost tracking engine, dashboard, API, and alerting system are all MIT-licensed. You can self-host it on a $5/month VPS and track every dollar your agents spend — forever, for free.

So why would anyone pay for the hosted version? Because running infrastructure isn't free, even when the software is.

Community (Free, Self-Hosted)

The MIT-licensed core includes everything a solo developer or small team needs:

  • Up to 5 agents tracked
  • 50,000 cost events per month
  • 30-day data retention
  • Real-time dashboards
  • Budget alerts
  • REST API for ingestion
  • SQLite or MySQL database

Deploy it on any Node.js host: a VPS, your Kubernetes cluster, a Raspberry Pi. It's a standard Next.js app with Prisma ORM — nothing exotic.

When to Upgrade to Pro ($39/month)

The hosted Pro tier makes sense when:

  • You need team access — Pro supports 5 team members with role-based access
  • You're past 5 agents — Pro tracks unlimited agents
  • You need higher event volume — 1M events/month vs 50K
  • You want webhook integrations — Slack, Discord, PagerDuty alerts
  • You don't want to maintain infrastructure — We handle uptime, backups, and updates

Enterprise

For organizations running hundreds of agents across multiple teams: SSO/SAML, RBAC, custom SLAs, on-premise deployment support, and data export to Snowflake or BigQuery for deep analytics.

The Philosophy

We believe cost visibility should be free. The core problem — "where is my money going?" — shouldn't be locked behind a paywall. We charge for scale, collaboration, and convenience, not for the basic insight that your research agent is 10x more expensive than you thought.

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Start tracking your AI agent costs

Open-source. Self-hosted. Free forever for the core engine.

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