Platform Pricing
Launch pricing — figures below are provisional. Tier prices and percentage rates are marked where a final board decision is pending. We’ll update this page and notify you by email before any change takes effect on your account.
PickLayer earns from three streams: your subscription, a small margin on AI usage routed through our infrastructure, and a platform fee on end-user billing revenue your app collects. Each stream is transparent and auditable from your dashboard.
Tiers
Tiers gate scale limits, not capabilities. Every tier, including Starter, includes the full feature set: AI gateway, end-user orgs, relays, portal, email, custom domains, and team collaboration. You choose a tier based on how many apps, end-users, and team members you need — not based on what you can build.
| Starter | Builder | Scale | Enterprise | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Price | Free | ~$79/mo (D-1) | ~$299/mo (D-1) | Custom |
| Apps | 1 | 3 | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| End-users | 1,000 | 10,000 | 100,000 | Custom |
| End-user MRR | $2,500 | $25,000 | Unlimited | Custom |
| Team members | 2 | 5 | 25 | Custom |
| Custom domains | — | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| BYOK (0% AI margin) | — | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Priority support | — | — | Yes | Yes |
| Volume AI pricing | — | — | — | Yes |
(D-1) = exact price subject to final confirmation at launch.
Exceeding limits
When you approach a tier limit, the dashboard prompts you to upgrade. If you go over, new-resource creation is blocked after a 7-day grace period — but existing traffic (active end-users, running apps) is never cut off.
Per-MAU overage: once you exceed your tier’s end-user allotment, additional monthly active users are billed at $0.02/MAU/mo — the same rate as Clerk — rather than blocking your app.
The three cost components
1. Subscription
Your monthly platform subscription (see tier table above). Covers all platform capabilities, storage allotment, and support tier.
Free Starter storage: 1 GB included. Usage beyond 1 GB is billed at $0.025/GB/mo against your builder wallet.
2. AI usage — provider cost + platform margin
Every AI call is debited from your prepaid builder wallet at the provider’s actual cost plus a platform margin. The margin is applied at cost-computation time and shown as a separate line item in your usage detail so you can always verify what was charged.
Platform margin: 5–10% over provider cost (D-2 = exact % pending; 7.5% is the working default). This covers our infrastructure, reliability work, multi-provider routing, and the cost-capture and billing pipeline.
BYOK (Bring Your Own Key): available on Builder tier and above. When you configure your own provider API keys, the platform margin drops to 0% — you pay the provider directly through your own account. A flat subscription covers the routing infrastructure.
If a model has no current pricing row — because a provider changed their list prices and we haven’t refreshed, or you’re using an uncommon model — the call is rejected rather than served at unknown cost. This is intentional: we never guess a cost, and you never get a bill you can’t reconcile.
3. Platform fee on end-user billing revenue
When your app collects money from end-users through PickLayer’s billing infrastructure (plan subscriptions, seat billing, credit top-ups), PickLayer takes a platform fee of 0.6% of the transaction amount (D-3 = exact rate pending). This is implemented as a Stripe Connect application fee on each checkout.
Minimum per transaction: $0.30 on transactions under $50. This prevents the Stripe per-transaction overhead from making tiny checkouts uneconomical for everyone.
No fee on zero-revenue traffic (free-tier end-users, internal test accounts, non-billing API calls).
The prepaid model
PickLayer is prepaid-only. You fund a builder wallet; usage debits it in real time. There are no credits included on the Starter tier — PickLayer funds no usage on your behalf.
This means:
- No surprise bill — you can never spend more than your wallet balance. When the balance reaches zero, metered calls are blocked, not deferred.
- No credit card required to start — you can build and configure everything without any wallet balance. You only need funds when you want to serve live AI traffic.
- Full control — top up by any amount, set a hard cap per end-user or per org, and monitor real-time depletion from the dashboard.
If a wallet is unfunded, the guard returns a 402 NOT_FUNDED response to the calling client. See Error Handling for the full error code list.
Worked example: the reference builder
1,000 MAU · $5,000/mo end-user MRR · $500/mo AI spend
| Line item | Calculation | Monthly cost |
|---|---|---|
| Builder subscription | flat | $79 |
| AI usage (7.5% margin) | $500 × 1.075 = $537.50 (you fund $537.50; margin = $37.50) | $537.50 from wallet |
| Platform fee on end-user revenue | $5,000 × 0.6% | $30 |
| Per-MAU overage | 0 (within Builder 10k allotment) | $0 |
| PickLayer platform revenue | subscription + margin + fee | $146.50 |
| Effective platform cost as % of MRR | $146.50 ÷ $5,000 | ≈ 2.9% |
The $537.50 AI wallet spend flows through to providers — PickLayer’s take is the $37.50 margin, not the full amount. Your effective all-in platform cost (subscription + margin + fee) lands at roughly $146/mo, or about 2.9% of end-user MRR. This sits inside the design target of 2.0–2.8%; the slight overage is because 7.5% is the unconfirmed default margin — the final rate (D-2) may be lower.
How we compare
| Option | Typical cost for this builder | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| PickLayer | ~$146/mo, ≈2.9% of MRR | All-in: sub + AI routing + billing infra |
| DIY (Stripe + Clerk + Portkey) | ~$224/mo | $39 Stripe Billing + $25 Clerk + $49 Portkey + $25 Supabase + integration time |
| MoR platforms (Paddle, Lemon Squeezy) | ~$300+/mo | 5% + $0.50/txn; they handle tax but you lose pricing control |
| OpenRouter only | Variable | 5.5% on credits; no auth, billing, or app infrastructure |
| App stores | 15–30% rev share | Required for iOS/Android digital goods; unavoidable |
DIY is cheapest if you have the engineering time to wire five services together and keep them running. MoR platforms are worth the premium only if you need global tax compliance out of the box. PickLayer sits in the middle: we handle the full AI + billing + user infrastructure while staying well below MoR margins.
The DIY cost compounds quickly with team time — maintaining integrations, handling Stripe webhook edge cases, and debugging billing discrepancies. We’ve absorbed that surface so you don’t have to.
Frequently asked questions
Do I need a credit card to sign up? No. You can create an account and build without any payment method on file. You only need to fund your wallet when you want to serve live AI traffic to end-users.
What happens if I go over the Starter end-user limit? You get a 7-day grace period before new user sign-ups are blocked. Existing users and their data are unaffected. Beyond the limit, additional MAUs are billed at $0.02/MAU/mo if you’ve added a payment method, or new sign-ups block otherwise.
What is BYOK and do I need it? BYOK (Bring Your Own Key) lets you supply your own API keys for upstream providers. PickLayer’s routing and billing pipeline still applies, but the provider costs come out of your upstream account at your negotiated rates and the platform margin drops to 0%. Available on Builder and above. Most builders start without it and add it once AI spend is large enough to matter.
Can I cap what end-users spend?
Yes. Every billing plan supports session_cost_cap, weekly_cost_cap, and monthly_cost_cap. The guard enforces these before calling the provider. See Billing for configuration details.
What if PickLayer can’t calculate a fee? The end-user transaction always goes through. If the platform fee fails to record (e.g., a Stripe hiccup), the checkout completes and the discrepancy is logged for reconciliation. You never lose a sale because of platform-fee math.
Are prices in USD? Yes. All billing is in USD. The internal accounting system uses pUSD (pico-USD, 10⁻¹² USD) for precision; amounts shown in the dashboard and on invoices are converted to dollars.
Prices marked D-1, D-2, D-3 are pending final board confirmation before launch. They will be locked and communicated to builders at least 14 days before they take effect. Existing accounts will be grandfathered for 6 months at 0% AI margin from the date they joined.