Account and billing
Choosing a plan
Match a plan to how you actually work, and know when to top up instead of upgrading.
Since every plan has every feature, choosing one is a question about volume rather than about capability. The honest advice is to start low and move up when you notice yourself running out; nothing is lost by doing it in that order.
Start on Free
A new account gets a one-time credit grant with no card and no expiry. It is deliberately enough to do real work rather than to watch a demo: a handful of full runs, including verification, on the same models a paid account uses.
Spend it on the kind of work you actually do. A counter tells you very little about whether this fits your team; the block you were dreading writing this week tells you everything.
A quick way to choose
| If this sounds like you | Start with |
|---|---|
| I want to see whether this is any good | Free. No card, and you keep whatever you do not spend. |
| I write RTL most working days and want one tool that keeps up | Pro. It is the plan built for a single engineer working continuously. |
| I run several jobs a day, or I lean on Debug and Optimize a lot | Max. Around five times Pro's monthly credit, and metered at a better rate, so it goes a little further than five times as far. |
| A few of us share this, or it sits in a CI-adjacent workflow | Team. The largest monthly credit, and priority support behind it. |
| My usage is spiky; some months are heavy and some are nothing | A lower plan plus usage credits when a big month lands. |
What actually drives your usage
Two accounts on the same plan can get very different mileage. These are the levers, in rough order of how much they matter:
- What you ask for. A self-contained module is cheap. Chasing a bug through an unfamiliar multi-file project is not, because the run has to read its way in before it can do anything.
- How precise the request is. A vague spec buys you a wrong module and a second run to correct it. Time spent on the spec is the cheapest optimisation available.
- How much verification you asked for. Auto-Verify is worth it on anything you intend to use; Exhaustive Verification is a bigger job and should be chosen deliberately.
- Model and reasoning effort. A powerful model at high effort on a shift register produces the same module as a fast one and costs more for it.
Tip
If a plan feels tight, look at these before upgrading. Turning Exhaustive Verification off for exploratory work, or being two sentences more specific, often moves more than a tier does.
A plan, or just a top-up?
Usage credits never expire, so a top-up is never wasted. Plan credit goes further per dollar, but it is monthly and it does not roll over. That gives a simple rule:
- Buy a plan when your usage is regular. Paying monthly for credit you reliably spend is the cheaper way to run.
- Buy usage credits when your usage is occasional or unpredictable, or when you need more room this week and do not want to change your plan for it.
- Do both if you are on a plan and hit a heavy month. Usage credits sit behind your plan credit and take over automatically; you do not have to switch anything.
Moving up, and moving back
- You can upgrade at any point in a cycle. Credit left on the plan you are leaving moves across to the new one rather than being lost.
- A plan runs for the term you paid for. Cancelling stops the renewal; it does not end the plan you already bought or take back the credit in the current cycle.
- When a paid plan ends, the account returns to Free, and anything left of the original welcome grant becomes spendable again.
- Usage credits are untouched by any of this. They are yours whatever plan you are on.
The mechanics are in Buying and managing a plan.
Is yearly worth it?
Yearly costs less per month and commits you for twelve months. It suits an account that has already had two or three steady months on the same plan. If you are still working out which tier fits, stay monthly; the saving is not large enough to make a wrong tier a good deal.
Still not sure
Ask us. Open a support ticket under the billing category, describe the work you are planning, and we will tell you which plan fits; we would rather do that than have you on a tier that does not.