Dify Pricing in 2026: Plans, Cost & Free Trial

A message credit is consumed each time an app or agent built on Dify processes a message — roughly one credit per conversational turn or workflow execution involving an LLM call. Sandbox includes 200/month, Professional 5,000/month, and Team 10,000/month. Self-hosted deployments aren't metered this way at all since you're running the software directly.

Within the software itself, yes — there are no message-credit caps, app limits, or workspace restrictions built into the open-source Community Edition. The practical ceiling is your server's compute and the LLM API costs you're paying separately to whichever model provider (OpenAI, Anthropic, or others) you've connected.

Yes. Dify's plans cover the platform itself — the workflow builder, RAG pipeline, agent tooling, and hosting. Whichever LLM you connect (GPT, Claude, Gemini, or an open-source model) bills separately through that provider's own API pricing. This is standard across LLM app-building platforms, since the platform and the underlying model are priced independently.

Custom development avoids platform fees entirely but requires building and maintaining the workflow engine, RAG pipeline, agent tooling, and monitoring dashboard yourself — real engineering time that a $0-133/month Dify subscription replaces. For teams without dedicated AI infrastructure engineers, Dify's pricing is typically far cheaper than the developer hours required to replicate its feature set from scratch.

The most common triggers are exceeding the 3-team-member cap on Professional, needing more than 5,000 monthly message credits, or requiring more than 500 knowledge base documents. Team's jump to 50 team members and 10,000 credits is built for a growing team collaborating on multiple apps rather than one or two builders.

Enterprise adds SSO/SAML, role-based access control, and compliance certifications (SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001) that matter specifically for regulated industries or large organizations with procurement requirements. If your organization doesn't need those specific compliance guarantees, Team or even self-hosted Community Edition may cover your actual functional needs at a fraction of Enterprise's custom pricing.

Yes — the published Professional and Team rates (roughly $49 and $133/month) are typically presented alongside annual pricing ($590 and $1,590/year respectively), which usually works out to a discount versus paying month to month. Check the current pricing page for exact monthly-vs-annual terms before committing.

Beyond the free software itself, a production self-hosted Dify deployment typically needs a VPS or cloud instance ($10-50/month depending on load), a database (often included or a small additional cost), and separate LLM API billing based on usage. All-in, a small-to-medium team can run self-hosted Dify for roughly $20-70/month in infrastructure plus LLM API costs — often noticeably cheaper than Professional or Team tier Cloud pricing for teams with the DevOps capacity to manage their own servers.

Message credits are consumed per conversational turn or workflow run regardless of whether that run involves a knowledge-base retrieval step, so a RAG-heavy app doesn't inherently cost more credits per message than a simple chat app. What does scale with RAG usage is knowledge-base storage and document count, which are capped separately per tier (50 documents/50MB on Sandbox up to 1,000 documents/20GB on Team) and are a more relevant constraint than message credits for document-heavy applications.

LLM API costs are billed the same regardless of whether you access the model through Dify or call the provider's API directly yourself — Dify's subscription is for the platform layer (workflow builder, RAG pipeline, monitoring, hosting), not a markup on model usage. Comparing 'Dify versus no platform at all' isn't really a pricing question so much as a build-versus-buy one: skipping Dify saves the subscription fee but requires building equivalent workflow, RAG, and monitoring infrastructure yourself.

Sandbox is usually enough to prove out a single pilot agent, given 200 message credits and 5 apps. If the pilot succeeds and moves toward wider internal rollout, Professional's 5,000 credits and 3 team members is the natural next step before Team becomes necessary for larger cross-functional rollout.

Reasonably well for teams that start self-hosted or on Sandbox and move up through Professional and Team as usage grows, since the tiers scale primarily on message volume and team size rather than punishing early growth with steep per-seat costs. The bigger cost driver for a fast-growing startup is usually LLM API usage itself, which scales independently of the Dify subscription tier.

Published Cloud pricing doesn't include separate setup fees for Sandbox, Professional, or Team — you sign up and start building immediately. Enterprise contracts may include implementation or onboarding support as part of a negotiated custom package, which is typical for enterprise software sold through direct sales rather than self-serve signup.

Downgrading below a tier's app, document, or team-member limits typically requires bringing usage back within the new tier's caps before or during the transition, similar to most standard SaaS downgrade flows. Check Dify's current account settings documentation for the specific handling of over-limit resources before downgrading, and export anything critical as a precaution beforehand just in case.