40. The pricing model

This chapter explains how Daalu Automation is priced. The numbers in this book are indicative; the current authoritative pricing lives at https://daalu.io/pricing and on your invoice. The model below changes infrequently.

What you pay for

Daalu’s pricing has three components:

1. Seats — per-user, per-month.
2. Connected sources — per-integration, per-month, after a generous included quota.
3. AI inference (cloud LLM fallback) — pass-through metering, no markup.

Local inference (your own GPU) is free at the Daalu layer — you bought the hardware.

Plans

Three plans for self-serve customers, plus Enterprise:

Starter

• Up to 5 seats.
• 5 connected sources included.
• 25 M cloud-LLM tokens/month included.
• Email-only support.
• Best for trying Daalu, very small teams.

Team

• Up to 25 seats.
• 25 connected sources included.
• 250 M cloud-LLM tokens/month included.
• In-app chat support, business-hours SLA.
• Most customers start here.

Business

• Unlimited seats (within reason).
• 100 connected sources included.
• 1 B cloud-LLM tokens/month included.
• 24/7 chat support, 1-hour P1 response SLA.
• For teams running real production.

Enterprise

• Negotiated. Talk to sales.
• Dedicated CSM, SLA up to 4-9s, security review pack, custom contract terms, SSO/SAML integration, private region, etc.

The exact dollar prices and which features are included on each plan are at the live pricing page.

Seat counting

A “seat” is a unique active user in your tenant during the billing month.

• Invited but never logged in: doesn’t count.
• Logged in but not used in the past 30 days: doesn’t count for that month.
• Removed mid-month: pro-rated.

This means small organizations with seasonal usage don’t pay for inactive users — but tenants where everyone’s heavy don’t get artificially low bills either.

Connected sources

A “connected source” is one configured integration. AWS account = 1, on-prem cluster = 1, Slack workspace = 1, etc.

What’s included per plan covers most teams. If you exceed, each additional source is metered at a small monthly fee.

What doesn’t count:

• Webhooks (in or out) — unlimited.
• Email notifications — included.

Inference metering

Local inference: free.

Cloud inference: pass-through. Daalu doesn’t mark up the underlying provider’s price. Your bill shows the provider’s per-token rate × the tokens consumed, plus a small handling fee documented per plan.

Cloud inference is also subject to the per-plan included quota. Below the quota, the included allowance is consumed. Above it, billed pass-through.

You can monitor your cloud-token consumption in real time on Billing → Local GPU + LLM router.

What’s bundled

Across all plans:

• Cluster federation (daalu-edge) — unlimited clusters per tenant.
• The full feature set — alerts, workflows, agents, SoT, Assistant.
• Audit logs.
• Standard data retention (90 days for events, 365 days for alerts and proposals).

Extended retention is an Enterprise add-on.

What’s not bundled

Out of scope of Daalu’s pricing:

• Your cloud bill. Daalu doesn’t proxy your cloud spend. You pay AWS / GCP / Azure directly. Daalu just shows the spend on its billing page.
• PagerDuty / Slack / your other vendors. Same point.
• Your GPU hardware. Same point.
• Storage of your own data. Daalu stores its own data (alerts, events, etc.). Your S3 bucket is yours.

Common questions

Can I bring my own LLM provider keys?

Yes, Enterprise only. The router will use your keys for cloud inference, billed directly by you to the provider. Daalu’s inference metering then doesn’t apply.

Can I self-host Daalu?

On the roadmap; not available today as a standard option. Talk to Enterprise sales.

What about non-profit / academic pricing?

We have an OSS-friendly tier for individual contributors and non-profit usage. Email [email protected].

What if I exceed my plan’s quotas?

You stay in service. The overage is billed on the next invoice at the published per-unit rates. We don’t gate your operations behind a quota for soft caps — only at hard tenant limits (e.g., absolute database size in extreme cases).

What’s the billing cycle?

Monthly, in arrears. Invoices issue on the 1st of each month for the previous month. Stripe-hosted card payments by default; ACH / wire transfer available on the Business plan and up.

Free trial

Every new tenant starts with a 14-day Team-tier trial. No credit card required to start. At day 14 the tenant automatically converts to the Starter plan; we email a reminder at day 10.

You can upgrade or downgrade at any time. Downgrades take effect at the start of the next month.

What’s next

Chapter 41 breaks down the inference SKUs in more detail.