Agent Pricing & Access Tiers¶
RUNE categorizes agents into three tiers based on their accessibility, licensing, and operational costs.
Access Tiers Matrix¶
| Tier | Meaning | Pricing Model | LLM Requirements | Support Level |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Tier 1 | Open Source (OSS) | Free (Self-hosted) | Open Weights (Ollama/Local) | Community + RUNE Core |
| Tier 2 | Freemium / Partial API | Pay-as-you-go | Hybrid (Local + SaaS API) | Best Effort |
| Tier 3 | Closed SaaS / Proprietary | Subscription | SaaS Managed | Protocol-only (No code access) |
Tier Details¶
Tier 1 — Open Source (OSS)¶
Agents in this tier are fully open-source and can be run entirely on-premises or in private cloud environments without external API costs. - Example Agents: K8sGPT, HolmesGPT, LangGraph, PentestGPT, Dagger. - Benefits: 100% data privacy, no recurring fees, fully testable.
Tier 2 — Freemium / Partial API¶
These agents offer an API but may have usage limits or require a paid plan for advanced features. - Example Agents: Metoro, Elicit, ComfyUI, BurpGPT, Consensus. - Costs: Varies by provider. RUNE cost estimation gates apply to these drivers.
Tier 3 — Closed SaaS¶
Agents in this tier are closed-source products delivered as a service. RUNE provides a DriverTransport implementation but cannot inspect or control the agent's internal logic.
- Example Agents: PagerDuty AI, Perplexity, Midjourney, Radiant, Harvey AI.
- Costs: Requires external subscription with the provider.
Compute Costs (Compute Provisioning)¶
While Tier 1 agents are free to license, they incur compute costs when provisioned via RUNE's GPU resource providers (e.g., Vast.ai). These costs are separate from agent licensing and are estimated before every run.
See ADR 0002: Cost Estimation for details on how these costs are calculated.