Plans

o8's deal is simple: the whole app is free with your own keys. No crippled tier, no trial, no feature held hostage behind a paywall.

Free, with your own keys

The governance gate, the Engineering Brain, multi-repo fleet orchestration, the canvas, mobile on your own network, and basic voice all ship free. It can be free because the actual coding work runs on your own AI subscriptions — bring your Claude or Codex CLI and o8 never injects its own key into the work path, so it carries no inference cost for you. Basic voice needs no keys either: dictation uses on-device speech, and o8 falls back to the built-in macOS voice.

Free is never the crippled version. We don't charge for capability — only for the cost of running the fast version for you.

(One honest note: today's release is dev-first — it assumes you already have a Claude or Codex subscription to power the core loop. A managed allowance for newcomers is on the way, not live yet.)

Founding Operator — the managed edition

If you'd rather it be instant and hands-off, the optional Founding Operator edition is a one-time purchase that funds the build and turns on a managed layer for life (within fair use), so you don't run on your own keys for the essentials:

• Managed essentials, instant — a fast Brain that answers immediately, automatic dictation polish, and premium speech-to-text. We run the fast version for you.
• Early access — founders sit a release channel ahead; experimental features land for them first. Everything reaches free users eventually — it's timing, not a wall.
• An exclusive o8 theme, a numbered Founding Operator badge, and your name on the founders wall.

See the Founding Operator edition for the tiers and what's left in the cohort.

A couple of things stay bring-your-own-key for everyone, founder or not — premium third-party voices and speech-to-speech. And a few things are still coming: an off-network mobile relay and always-on cloud agents are direction, not today's feature set.