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Pricing

Free to self-host. The fence is drawn in public.

The answering core is AGPL-3.0 and free forever — no seat caps, no per-question metering, no resolution fees. We sell the operations and compliance layer around it, and nothing else. Where that line sits is written into the repository, not just onto this page.

Last updated: 2026-09-22

Machine-readable version for agents: /pricing.md

Self-hosted

Start here

Freeforever

The whole answering product, under AGPL-3.0. This is not a trial and not a crippled tier — it's the thing we build.

  • Unlimited questions — no per-question or per-resolution metering
  • Unlimited projects and documentation sources
  • Grounded answers with citations and refusal behaviour
  • Docs-gap and unanswered-question analytics
  • The eval harness, runnable in your CI
  • Brandable widget, React wrapper and streaming client (MIT)
  • Any model: OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, or local via Ollama
  • One organisation, with owner / admin / editor / viewer roles
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You pay for your own Postgres and your own model tokens. Nothing to us.

Cloud

Not yetavailable

A hosted Deskbell, for teams that want the product without operating it. It doesn't exist yet, and we would rather say so than collect emails against a page that implies it does.

  • Planned: managed hosting, usage-based pricing
  • Planned: EU and US regions
  • Planned: automatic upgrades and backups
Tell us what you'd need

Being built after self-hosting is proven, not before. If you want it sooner, telling us why moves it up.

Enterprise Edition

Customper organisation

The operations and compliance layer, for agencies running many clients and companies with procurement requirements. This is the only thing we sell.

  • Multi-organisation management — one instance, many clients
  • SSO and SCIM provisioning
  • Custom roles beyond the four defaults
  • Audit logging suitable as EU AI Act Article 12 evidence
  • White-label rights
  • Support with response commitments
Talk to us

No published price yet — we haven't sold enough of it to know what's fair. Early customers get to influence that.

The commitment

What can never move behind a paywall

Four open-source projects in this lane closed or re-licensed within eighteen months, so “trust us” is worth nothing here. This is the specific list, and it lives in the repository where a change to it would be a visible commit.

Always free, always open

  • Retrieval and the grounding pipeline
  • Citations and refusal behaviour
  • All ingestion connectors
  • The eval harness
  • Docs-gap analytics
  • The widget and every SDK (MIT)
  • Model choice, including local models

What we charge for

  • Managing many organisations from one instance
  • SSO and SCIM provisioning
  • Custom roles beyond the defaults
  • Audit logging built for compliance evidence
  • White-label rights
  • Support commitments

Every item is an operations or compliance concern. None of them make answers better — that's the test we apply before anything goes in this column.

The boundary in code: LICENSE and packages/ee/FEATURES.

Compared

What the paid alternatives cost

For context, not as a dunk: Intercom's Fin charges $0.99 per resolution with a minimum monthly commitment, and Kapa.ai prices on request beyond a 14-day trial. Both are more capable than Deskbell today.

The Fin arithmetic, by volumeDeskbell vs Kapa.ai

Questions

Pricing questions

Is the free tier actually free, or free-until-you-need-it?

Actually free. There is no question limit, no seat cap and no per-resolution fee, and the answering core cannot move behind the commercial licence — that boundary is written into the repository's LICENSE file and the enterprise package's FEATURES file, and any change to it lands as a public commit.

What do I actually pay for when self-hosting?

A Postgres instance, a small container host, and tokens from whichever model provider you configure. With a local model through Ollama, the token cost goes to zero and you trade it for hardware and some answer quality you should measure before committing.

Why is there no price on the Enterprise Edition?

Because we would be making one up. We haven't sold enough of it to know what's fair, and publishing a number we'd immediately renegotiate is worse than saying so. Early customers get to influence the pricing, which is the honest upside of being early.

Will the AGPL licence cause problems for my company?

Not for embedding it. The widget and SDKs — everything that touches your application — are MIT, so your own code never inherits AGPL obligations. The AGPL applies to the server you run, which matters only if you distribute a modified Deskbell as a service.

What happens to my data if I stop using Deskbell?

Nothing, because it never left. Conversations, documents and embeddings live in your own Postgres. There is no export process to request and no vendor to ask, which is the practical difference between self-hosting and a hosted product.

Nothing to sign up for

There is no account, no trial and no credit card. Clone the repository and run one command.

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