The free plan

Every account is on one of two plans. Standard is what every account was before the free plan existed: the instance's own text model, its image and video generators, paid for by whoever holds the keys. Free costs the instance nothing but its own hardware: its text goes to a model that costs nothing, its pictures and footage come from the free libraries, and the paid generators are closed to it.

It exists so an instance can open its sign-ups to people it does not know without opening its wallet to them. New accounts start on the free plan by default; an administrator moves an account to standard in one click.

What a free account can do#

Everything the free plan keeps costs the server time and nothing else: a film is rendered by the worker on the same machine, a live inspiration fetch runs the local Chromium. Those features keep their own access lists.

Setting it up#

1. A model that costs nothing#

Admin → Providers → Text models → ③ Free plan. It is a third profile beside generation and Muse, with the same providers. Pick one of these:

• an OpenRouter model whose id ends in :free, with a key from an account that holds no credit — a key with nothing to spend cannot be billed. The free models share a small daily allowance per key: check OpenRouter's own page for the current numbers;
• a Groq, Google Gemini or Cerebras key from an account with no payment method attached — their free tiers are rate-limited rather than billed;
• a model running on the server itself, through Ollama or LM Studio ("Compatible OpenAI" with a http://127.0.0.1:… address): no key, no bill, but every generation takes the processor, and a CPU-only server writes slowly.

Mocky guarantees that a free account's call never reaches the paid profile. Whether the key you put in the free profile can be charged is the provider's business — which is why the advice above is always "an account with nothing to spend".

Left empty, the free profile borrows nothing. Free accounts then use the provider each person fills in under Settings, with their own key — which costs the instance nothing either. They never fall back onto the paid model.

2. Who starts free#

Admin → Users → Free plan → Plan for new accounts. Free by default. It applies to public sign-ups, to accounts created through "Sign in with Dashy", and to accounts an administrator creates (the creation form has a Plan field that starts on this value).

Changing it never moves an account that already exists, and every account created before the free plan existed is standard. An administrator stays on the standard plan — they are the one configuring the paid models — unless they try the free plan on their own account (step 4).

To move one account, use Move to free / Move to standard on its row in the account list. It takes effect on its next request.

3. The daily limit#

Admin → Users → Free plan → Generations a day. Twenty by default; 0 means unlimited.

What counts as one generation: a new screen, an edit, a polish, an accessibility fix, a fit to page — each thing a person asked for that rewrites a screen. The calls that serve it (the planner, a repair, reading a screenshot, choosing a photo, Muse's dossier) do not count, so one new screen costs one generation, not four.

Three details:

• Those other calls still have a ceiling — twelve times the limit — so a browser that labelled every call as a planner call would still meet a wall. An honest account never does.
• Once the generations are spent, every call is refused, counted or not: a new screen's planner would otherwise run on the shared key only for the generation behind it to be refused.
• The count resets at midnight, server time, and it is kept on disk (free-quota.json), so a restart does not hand everyone a fresh day.

The limit only applies to calls that reach the instance's free model. A free account using its own key (no free model configured, or its own chosen in Settings over the free one) spends nobody's quota but its own.

4. Testing it with your own account#

Admin → Users → Test with my account → My account behaves as: Free. Your administrator account then gets exactly what a free account gets: the free model writes your screens, the daily limit counts your generations, pictures come from the free libraries, and the paid generators refuse you. It is how you judge a free model before opening sign-ups, without a second account to sign in with.

• You keep administration. A Testing free badge sits in the masthead on every page, and Settings says it too: a forgotten switch must not pass for a broken instance.
• It is your account's switch only — nobody can turn it on for someone else, and Move to free still refuses an administrator. Set it back to Standard in the same place.
• Each change is written to the audit log.

What a free account sees#

• Settings opens on a Free plan card: what the plan includes, which model answers, and how many generations are left today — or, with no free model on the instance, a note asking for their own provider below.
• The composer's Images choice offers Free and None only: pictures come from the free libraries or not at all, and the AI door of a document's picture is closed.
• When the day is spent, a generation fails with: "Daily limit reached: the free plan allows N generations a day. It resets at midnight."
• A paid generator reached anyway (the image picker, a film's variants) answers with a sentence saying it is not on the free plan.

How it is enforced#

Everything is decided on the server, from the account, never from what the browser says. The rules are written down as invariants F1 to F3; in short:

• every route that resolves a text model for somebody goes through one function, textTargetFor, and on the free plan it answers the free profile or nothing;
• the paid generators (/api/images/generate, /api/videos/generate, /api/video/variants) refuse a free account at the door, with code: "free-plan";
• the limit answers 429 with code: "free-quota".

server/plan-routes.test.js proves it on a real server: two fake providers on loopback, one standing for the paid model and one for the free model, and a count of what each one received.

Limits#

• In npm run dev, Vite serves the model proxy itself, without accounts, so the plan does not apply to generations there. Check the free plan against a production build — the same caveat as the admin dashboard.
• The plan does not make a key free. See step 1.
• Open sign-ups invite people to make several accounts to get several days' worth. The limit is a fairness rule between honest accounts, not a wall against a determined one; closing sign-ups is.