Pricing
Pay for reach. Never for reads.
Querying your own notes should cost nothing, so on every tier, it does. You only pay when our hardware hosts your index and serves it to agents anywhere.
Cloud hosting is not live yet. Local stays free; Cloud is $8/month when we ship it.
Local
$0forever
Your hardware does the work, so it costs you nothing.
- Unlimited notes, unlimited reads
- Connect Grok, Grok Bot, Cursor, and any MCP client
- Fast local search, fully offline
- private/ folder support. Never leaves your machine.
- CLI included
- No account required
Cloud
Not yet available$8/month
Hosted index and remote reach. Your notes, from anywhere.
- Everything in Local
- Hosted index, always warm
- Remote access for AI running anywhere
- Web app access from any device
- Reads never metered. A promise, not a plan.
- Device sync and offline-first editing on the roadmap
Teams
Later
Shared vaults, SSO, and an audit trail, when teams ask for it. Seats plus usage.
How pricing works
Three rules we will not break
The pricing model is the same architecture decision that makes the product trustworthy.
Local stays free forever. Cloud billing ships when hosting does.
Reads are never metered
A memory you hesitate to query is worthless. Searching, reading, and browsing your notes is free on every tier, at any volume. Asking your own notes a question should never cost a cent.
You pay for reach, not access
Local is free because your machine does the work. Cloud costs money because our machines do it: hosting the index and serving it to agents anywhere. That is the entire pricing model.
Leaving is free, too
Ela never converts your notes into a proprietary format. Cancel, and your folder is exactly what it always was: markdown files you own, readable by anything.
FAQ
Fair questions, straight answers
Do you train AI models on my notes?
No. Your notes are indexed for retrieval and served to the AI tools you connect. Nothing else. Our logs never contain your note text.
What happens to my private/ folder on the Cloud plan?
It stays on your machine. Cloud sync skips it entirely. It never reaches our servers, logs, or caches. Only your local setup can see it, and that boundary is tested on every release.
Is unlimited reads really unlimited?
Yes. It is an architectural commitment, not a promotion: the expensive work happens when a note is saved, not when you ask a question. Metering reads would break the product.
What if I cancel Cloud?
Your notes were never hostage: the folder on your disk is the source of truth. The hosted copy is deleted, the local tier keeps working, and you can re-subscribe whenever you want the reach back.
Is $8/month final?
It is the early-access price and our target. If real infrastructure costs force a change we will say so plainly. The shape is permanent: local free, reads unmetered, you pay only for cloud reach.
Point it at a folder. Start asking.
Keep the notes you have. Connect the tools you already use. Local is free.
Local tier, MCP server, and the web and desktop apps work today. Cloud hosting and the desktop signing pipeline are not live yet.