Pricing that matches the rest of Local Hoist: clear, visible, and under your control.

Managed Credits means Local Hoist handles provider access for you. You buy credits from us, we route requests through our proxy without logging content, and the fee is 10% at purchase time. BYOK means you connect your own provider keys, requests go directly from your device to the provider, and Local Hoist charges a 5.5% usage fee through credit consumption at current credit pricing.

No. Local Hoist is pay as you go. You start with free credits, buy more only when you need them, and track usage in real time. If you stop using the app, there is no recurring subscription to cancel.

Yes. The same shared credit balance supports both. You can start with managed credits, add provider keys later, use BYOK where you have coverage, and still fall back to managed credits for providers or features you have not configured. Prefer BYOK mode will use your keys when available and managed credits for the rest.

Local Hoist supports OpenAI, Anthropic, Google Gemini, Groq, and OpenRouter. OpenRouter gives you access to hundreds of additional models while keeping the same Local Hoist interface and tooling.

Our spending limits include our best estimate of your provider costs and Local Hoist credit costs, along with any managed credit costs. You can think of this as setting the limit on how much you are willing to spend on AI usage through Local Hoist. It does not include the initial 10% credit purchase fee, which is paid upfront when you buy credits.

Most providers do not give actual per-call cost visibility. Instead, they return usage metadata such as input tokens, cached input tokens, cache write tokens, output tokens, and similar counters. We convert those usage measurements into cost using each provider's published pricing. For AI voice and audio output, we use the closest available published approximation. For example, text-to-speech is estimated from duration using OpenAI's originally published 1.5¢ per minute rate, archived here: OpenAI pricing archive.

With BYOK, requests go directly from your device to the provider and never pass through Local Hoist infrastructure. Your keys stay in your encrypted system keychain. With Managed Credits, requests are proxied through Local Hoist so we can handle provider access for you, but content streams through without being logged. In both cases, conversations and files live locally on your device.

Both pricing modes include the full Local Hoist product experience: real-time cost tracking, tool-call visibility, rollback and roll-forward, configurable compression, sub-agents, provider analytics, and image generation workflows where the model can inspect and iterate on its own outputs. OpenAI BYOK also includes the realtime voice assistant.

You don't need to purchase anything to try Local Hoist for the first time. After you've used up your $10 trial credits, you can purchase additional credits. Payments are processed through Stripe, so your payment information is handled securely. Auto-replenish is available as an opt-in setting in the dashboard and is also processed through Stripe according to your selected settings.

The OpenAI realtime helper assistant is currently available with BYOK only. Because it uses OpenAI's realtime websocket API, we do not support it through managed credits today and we do not add any Local Hoist fee to that usage. We show our best estimate of the underlying provider cost, but that estimate is less precise than our normal cost tracking because the realtime API can emit duplicate-looking responses and its billing behavior is harder to measure exactly. In practice, treat it as a useful beta feature: bring your own OpenAI key, expect provider charges to apply directly, and expect the displayed cost to be a best estimate rather than the same level of precision we can provide for standard requests.