What Manus costs, and the open-source option you can self-host

What Manus charges

Manus is a hosted general AI agent, and it bills by credits rather than a flat tool fee. Its free plan costs $0 per month and gives 300 credits refreshed daily, one concurrent task and two scheduled automations, with Manus 2.0 Lite in Agent Mode. Paid Pro plans start from $20 per month with 4,000 monthly credits, and a higher Pro allowance starts from $40 per month with 8,000 monthly credits and a seven-day trial. The Team plan starts from $20 per seat per month, and annual billing saves about 17%. Manus lists these plans in its help center and plans documentation, checked October 2026.

How Manus credits work

A Manus credit is a unit of work, so the cost of a task depends on how complex it is rather than how long it runs. The same subscription can cover many short lookups or a handful of long research runs, and Manus estimates a task's credit use in the dashboard before it starts. Plan credits reset at the start of each billing cycle and do not carry over, while separately purchased add-on credits never expire. When the balance runs low, Manus pauses credit-using actions until the next cycle or a top-up.

The hidden cost of a hosted-only agent

A hosted agent's sticker price is only the first line of its bill. The plan fee buys a pool of credits, and the real monthly cost tracks how much work the agent does: heavier tasks draw more credits, so a busy month costs more than a quiet one. Because Manus runs in Manus's cloud, the agents, the memory and the configuration live in the vendor's account. Your account keeps the outputs, and the system that produced them stays with the vendor. Lindy has the same shape, granting $50 in credits for seven days, then charging from $49.99 per seat per month for 5,000 pooled credits that do not roll over. OpenClaw takes the other route as an open-source assistant with no paid tier.

How Kortix is priced

Kortix is the open-source AI Operating System, and it is priced as software you can run yourself or rent as a managed cloud. "Run it on Kortix Cloud, in your VPC, or on your own on-prem network. Self-host is free." The managed cloud has a free tier and a flat team plan: "Free is $0 with 200 credits per month and 1 project. The team plan is $40 per seat per month with 2,500 credits per month per seat, pooled." Kortix's pricing page adds that Agent Computer compute is billed per second, per resource, and that the default machine costs about $0.20 per hour while running and $0 while stopped. Self-hosting keeps the software free, and your recurring cost is the model and compute you supply. The install and operation steps are in the self-hosting guide.

How to compare total cost of ownership

To compare total cost, work through four numbers. First, count the seats and add only the people who need one. Second, estimate the credits a real month of work consumes at the complexity your tasks actually have, then add any top-ups. Third, add the model and compute bills a self-hosted stack pushes onto you: with Kortix self-host the software is free, but you still pay your model provider. Fourth, ask what leaves with you when you stop paying. A hosted vendor returns your outputs, while a system you host returns the whole configuration. The Kortix comparison and Kortix vs Manus pages line up the options on those axes, and the Manus alternatives page covers the wider field.