One product. Three ways to pay.
Every feature is in every plan. You only choose whose API keys pay. Running Ferrow on your own machine is free and stays free — what that covers.
Switch to yearly and it is twelve months for nine.
Billed once a year. Cancel and the rest of the year is still yours.
Private
You bring the keys.
or $180 a year — twelve months for nine.
$180 billed yearly. That is twelve months for nine.
- The product itself is already free on your own machine — Private is not how you unlock it.
- What $20 buys is Ferrow’s own side: the relay, so a phone or a browser can reach your hub; sync between your machines; and the hosted app at app.ferrow.ai.
- Support by email, read by a person. Your questions get answered.
- Your own API keys, or a model running on your own machine. Stored in your keychain. Whatever your provider charges you is between you and them — Ferrow never sees that bill and takes no cut of it.
- 3 days, free — a card is required and is not charged for 3 days.
Cancel inside it with
ferrow unsubscribeand you are charged nothing.
Managed
We hold the keys.
Same subscription. Usage on top, itemized per call.
$180 billed yearly. Usage on top, itemized per call.
A $10 pack credits exactly $10 of usage. No bonus tiers, no breakage games.
A $25 pack credits exactly $25 of usage. No bonus tiers, no breakage games.
A $50 pack credits exactly $50 of usage. No bonus tiers, no breakage games.
- Everything in Private, plus:
- Models prebuilt and billed through Ferrow — no provider accounts to open, no five dashboards to keep.
- You pay for what you use. Itemized per call, or drawn from a prepaid pack first if you carry one. Nothing is ever billed twice.
- A hard stop you set.
ferrow spendcap 50. Ferrow does not charge past it, and there is no overage line because there is no overage. - No trial — Managed spends real money on your behalf from the first call, so a free trial would be us giving away someone else's compute.
Lifetime
Own it outright.
Less than ten months of the yearly price, paid once.
- Everything in Private, plus:
- The product, for good. A key that never expires. No renewal, no monthly line, nothing to cancel later.
- On your own API keys: nothing more to pay, ever.
- If you use Managed models, compute is still metered per call — the key owns the product, not someone else's GPUs.
After you pay, you get a key. Ferrow does not switch a computer on by itself — one line does, on any machine you want to use it on:
ferrow activate <your key>Your key looks like ferrow_ followed by a long string, and it
is on the page checkout returns you to. The same command also takes the cs_
checkout reference or the whole web address of that page, so whatever you copied will
do. Changing your mind is /refunds.
The local half is free, and stays free.
You do not need an account to use the local product — nothing in the command path ever asks for one. An email and a password makes an account when you want your place saved across machines: no card, no checkout, nothing to cancel later. Everything Ferrow does on your own machine is yours either way and does not expire: the vault, memory, search, the change log and undo, agents, skills, projects, import, the local UI, and any model you run on your own hardware or your own API key.
Four things need Ferrow's own servers or Ferrow's own keys, and those are what a subscription pays for: the relay, so a phone or a browser can reach your hub; sync between your machines; the hosted app at app.ferrow.ai; and support by email. Managed models are never free — every call spends real money on your behalf from the first one. A free account that reaches one of those is told so plainly and pointed here. It is not broken, and it is not asked twice.
The 3-day trial is a different offer and it has not changed: it is Private
only, a card is required and is not charged for 3 days, and
ferrow unsubscribe inside those days charges you nothing.
Subscribing is two commands.
npm install -g @ferrow/ferrow
ferrow subscribe monthly # or: yearly, or add --managedThe name is scoped — @ferrow/ferrow — but the
command it installs is just ferrow. /download
ships the same thing as a checkable tarball with its sha256.
Ferrow prints the checkout link and does not open your
browser. You should see where you are being sent before you get there. After you
pay, ferrow billing finishes the machine you ran that from — and
ferrow activate <your key> switches on any other one, including the
machines of anybody who bought with the buttons above.
On Managed, set the number before you spend anything: ferrow spendcap 50.
ferrow spendcap status shows the cap, what has been spent, and what is
left. There is no overage line on your bill, because there is no overage.
What actually leaves my machine?
Your prompt goes to the model provider you connected — on Private, that is your own account; on Managed, it is Ferrow's. That is the only outbound call the CLI makes.
Billing talks to Stripe, which sees a subscription id and an email and never sees a vault. If you turn on the relay so your phone or a browser can reach your hub, it carries end-to-end-encrypted payloads between your own devices and cannot read them.
Your notes do not leave. Your API keys do not leave. There is no telemetry and no analytics on this site or in the CLI.
What does Managed actually cost me?
The subscription, plus what you use — itemized per call, so every charge on the bill is one you can see and account for. You pay for what you use, and nothing else.
The number that decides your bill is the cap, and you set it. Ferrow stops there.
If you never set one it uses a conservative default — ferrow spendcap
status tells you what it is before you spend anything.
How do I cancel?
ferrow unsubscribe. That is the entire flow. No confirmation maze, no
discount offer, no exit survey.
It tells you the date your plan ends. You keep everything you paid for until then, and nothing else is charged. Your vault and your notes were never ours — they are files on your disk and they stay exactly where they are.
Is anything locked behind a plan?
No local feature is. The vault, memory, search, undo, skills, the Council, projects, import and the local UI are the same on a free account as on any plan, and there is no check anywhere in the command path that asks which one you are on.
What a plan buys is Ferrow's side of it: the relay, sync between your machines, the hosted app, and support. Two things additionally need Ferrow's own keys and therefore need Managed: models billed through Ferrow, and schedules that run while your laptop is shut. Everything else runs on yours, free, for as long as you want it.
Free account, or the 3-day trial?
They answer different questions. The free account is for running Ferrow on your own machine on your own keys, and it does not end. The trial is for trying a Private subscription: 3 days, a card is required, nothing is charged for those days, and it exists because relay, sync and the hosted app cannot be tried without them running.
Starting free costs nothing and blocks nothing — you can subscribe later from the same account, and you are not asked to decide today.
Monthly or yearly?
$20 a month, or $180 for a year — twelve months for the price of nine. Ferrow is pre-1.0 and has not had its first outside user, so the honest advice is to start monthly and switch when you are sure.
Can I switch between Private and Managed?
Yes — ferrow subscribe monthly --managed starts a Managed plan, and
dropping the flag starts a Private one. A new checkout is a new subscription, so
cancel the old one with ferrow unsubscribe first.
Which is this, live or test?
Live, always, unless you pass --test. The CLI will not quietly put you
in test mode: somebody typing ferrow subscribe means to subscribe, and
a command that took their time for nothing would be its own kind of lie.
Your files never leave your machine. No telemetry, no sync, no cloud copy.
Delete Ferrow tomorrow and your notes are still ordinary files in an ordinary folder.