Ollama Pricing Explained: Plans, Costs and What You Get

Ollama is free locally and metered in the cloud: pay as you go at $0, Pro at $20 with $60 of credits, Max at $100, and Team at $500. Plans and model rates.

By Galactic News Editorial · Published 2026-11-10T04:29:00+00:00 · Updated 2026-11-10T04:29:00+00:00

Ollama Pricing Explained: Plans, Costs and What You Get

Ollama pricing has two sides. Running models on your own hardware is free and unlimited on every plan. Running models on Ollama's servers, through Ollama Cloud, is metered. Cloud plans run from $0 pay as you go to $500 a month for teams, with usage credits included on paid plans. This guide explains each plan, the per-token model prices, and which plan fits which user.

The key fact is simple: you only pay when you use Ollama Cloud. Local use never costs anything. That makes Ollama different from hosted API providers, where every request has a price.

Ollama pricing at a glance

Every plan includes unlimited local use. Paid plans add access to larger pro models, and Max adds early access to the newest models. Team adds unlimited users, centralized billing and administration, priority support, and shared projects, skills, and instructions, which Ollama lists as coming soon. Enterprise adds model access controls, cost budgets per user and API key, a private Slack channel, and custom security questionnaires.

How usage credits work

Cloud usage is measured in tokens at each model's published rate. Paid plans include a set dollar amount of usage credits each month. Ollama uses the included credits first, then draws from any purchased usage credit balance. Pay as you go accounts pay for each request with usage credits they buy.

Included usage does not roll over. It resets monthly on the same day of the month the subscription started, including on annual plans. On paid plans, Ollama sends an email reminder at 90% of included monthly usage. That reminder can be turned off in settings.

Concurrency limits cap how many requests can run at once. Pay as you go and Pro allow 3 concurrent requests. Max and Team allow 10. Requests beyond the limit are queued and processed as soon as a slot opens. If the queue is full, the request is rejected until a slot frees up.

The value math is straightforward. Pro costs $20 a month and includes $60 of usage credits, so each dollar buys $3 of usage. Max costs $100 and includes $300, the same $3 per dollar. Team costs $500 and includes $1,000, or $2 per dollar, but the credits are shared across unlimited users. Annual Pro billing at $200 a year works out to $16.67 a month.

Model pricing: what each token costs

Cloud models are priced per million tokens, with separate rates for input, cached input, and output. Prices are before tax. The table below lists a selection from Ollama's published model pricing.

Off-peak pricing applies outside 12:00 to 18:00 UTC on weekdays and all day on weekends. For example, deepseek-v4.1-flash drops to $0.15 per million input tokens and $0.60 per million output tokens off peak. Cached input is far cheaper than fresh input on most models, which is why prompt caching matters for repeated context.

The spread between models is wide. A million output tokens costs $0.30 on gpt-oss:20b and $15.00 on kimi-k3. Pick the model by the job, not by habit. A small model handles drafting and classification. A large model handles hard reasoning.

Local vs cloud: when to pay at all

Local use is the free path. Install Ollama, download a model, and run it on your own machine. There are no API fees, no per-token charges, and no subscription. The cost is the hardware you already own. A modern laptop runs small models well. A desktop GPU runs larger ones.

Cloud is the answer when the model is too large for your hardware, when you need a model you cannot run locally, or when you need an API that scales without managing GPUs. Ollama Cloud uses the same app, command line, and API as local Ollama, so switching between the two is a configuration change, not a rewrite.

Privacy is a real difference between the two. Local runs keep everything on your machine. Cloud runs send prompts to Ollama's servers. Ollama states that prompt and response data is never logged or trained on, and that models run primarily in the United States, with routing to Europe for extra capacity. Ollama hosts cloud models with NVIDIA Cloud Providers and requires no-logging, no-training, and zero data retention policies from partners. Read the privacy terms yourself before sending sensitive data to any cloud service.

Which plan should you pick

Start with Pay as you go if you mostly run models locally and only need cloud for occasional large models. There is no subscription, and you pay only for what you use.

Move to Pro at $20 a month when cloud use becomes regular. The $60 of included credits covers a large amount of work on the cheaper models. At gpt-oss:20b rates, $60 buys roughly 850 million input tokens or 200 million output tokens. Annual billing cuts the effective price to $16.67 a month.

Move to Max at $100 a month when you run multiple agents at once or need early access to new models. The 10 concurrent requests matter for parallel agent work. The $300 of credits covers five times the usage of Pro.

Team at $500 a month fits a group that shares usage and billing. The $1,000 of shared credits and unlimited users make sense when several developers draw from one pool. Enterprise is for larger teams that need volume pricing, access controls, and cost budgets per user.

Bottom line

Ollama costs nothing if you run models locally, and that will cover most developers most of the time. Cloud starts free with pay as you go, then $20 a month for Pro with $60 of credits, $100 a month for Max with $300, and $500 a month for Team with $1,000 shared. Pick the plan by how much cloud usage you actually run and how many requests you run at once. Check the live pricing page before you budget, because model rates and plan details change.