Short answer: Elephas pricing has four tiers. Free gives 20 AI credits a month, Standard costs $19 a month, Professional $39 and Pro+ $49, with about 17% off on yearly billing. The feature most people buy Elephas for, Super Brain (chatting with your own files), starts at Professional, so the realistic price for that use is $39 a month, Mac and iPhone only.
Elephas is a Mac AI assistant that writes, rewrites and answers questions from a local knowledge base it calls a Super Brain. Its pricing page changed shape this year: plans are now built around monthly AI credits and around how much control you get over redaction of sensitive data. The numbers below come from elephas.app/pricing. Several software directories still show older, much lower prices, and we explain why further down.
Elephas pricing for every plan
| Free | Standard | Professional | Pro+ | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Monthly price | $0 | $19 | $39 | $49 |
| Yearly billing | Not applicable | About 17% off | About 17% off | About 17% off |
| AI credits a month | 20 | 100 | 500 | 1,000 |
| Super Brain (chat with your files) | No | No | Yes | Yes |
| Super Brain on iPhone and iPad | No | No | Yes | Yes |
| Integrations (Apple Notes, Notion, Obsidian) | No | No | Yes | Yes |
| Redaction visibility | No | Automatic redaction | Basic visibility | Full inspector and settings |
| Fully offline AI workflows | No | No | No | Optional |
| Priority support and onboarding call | No | No | No | Yes |
Every new download starts with seven days of Pro switched on automatically, and the free plan needs no credit card. Elephas requires macOS 13 or later. Teams fill in a form and get a quote; there is no published per-seat price.
How much does Elephas cost per year?
Paying month to month, Standard comes to $228 a year, Professional to $468 and Pro+ to $588. Elephas advertises savings of about 17% on yearly billing, which puts the plans at roughly $190, $388 and $488 a year. The exact yearly figure shows at checkout, so treat those as estimates rather than quotes.
The number that matters depends on why you are buying. If you want an AI writing assistant inside every Mac app, Standard at $19 is the honest entry point. If you want to drop your PDFs, notes and documents into one place and ask questions across them, you need Super Brain, which means Professional at $39 a month, or about $388 a year.
Is Elephas free?
Partly. The free plan gives you 20 credits a month on the built-in Elephas AI engine, which is enough to test the writing tools for a few days but not to use it as a daily knowledge base. Super Brain is not part of the free plan. The seven-day Pro trial is the real way to judge it, so load your actual documents into it during that week rather than sample files.
What Elephas credits mean for your bill
Credits pay for chat through the built-in engine, and different models spend credits at different rates. When you run out, you can buy a credit top-up. There are two ways around credits altogether: plug in your own OpenAI or Anthropic API key, in which case you pay those providers directly by usage, or run a local model offline. Indexing your files does not spend credits, although older Super Brains built with the previous embedding method do.
For a buyer, that makes the plan price a floor rather than the full cost. A heavy user on Professional who brings an API key pays $39 a month to Elephas plus whatever the model provider charges, which on long documents can add up faster than the subscription.
Why directories show cheaper Elephas prices
Software listings such as SaaSworthy still show Standard at $4.99, Pro at $8.99 and Pro+ at $14.99 a month, plus lifetime licenses from $129 to $249. Capterra lists a starting price of $14.99. Those figures belong to Elephas's older plan structure. The current pricing page lists no lifetime option and starts paid plans at $19. If you find a lifetime deal for sale, check whether it covers Super Brain and credits under the new plans before you buy it.
Does Elephas work on Windows?
No. Elephas runs on Mac, iPhone and iPad, and syncs between them through the same Apple account. Its site shows a Windows waitlist without a release date. One more catch: the Mac App Store edition cannot include Super Command or the writing features because of sandbox rules, so buy from the Elephas site if you want the full app.
If part of your team is on Windows, or you want clients to ask questions without installing anything, compare it with a browser-based tool. Our Elephas alternative page lines up the options that run anywhere.
Elephas compared with other ways to ask your own documents
| Tool | Price | Chat with your own files | Platforms | A client can ask your files |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Elephas Professional | $39 a month, about 17% off yearly | Yes, Super Brain | Mac, iPhone, iPad | No |
| ChatGPT Plus | $20 a month | Per chat or per Project, with file caps | Web, desktop, mobile | Through a custom GPT, after signing in to ChatGPT |
| Claude Pro | $20 a month, $17 billed yearly | Per chat or per Project | Web, desktop, mobile | Only teammates on a Claude Team plan |
| MentalClone Starter | $49 a month, or $288 a year ($24 a month) | Yes, one library, unlimited documents | Any browser | Yes, private links with no account |
| MentalClone Professional | $99 a month, or $588 a year ($49 a month) | Yes, reads three times more of each document per answer | Any browser | Yes, private links with no account |
Elephas wins in three places, and it is worth saying plainly. It writes inside any Mac app, which a browser tool cannot do. It can run fully offline with a local model on Pro+. And its automatic redaction strips account numbers, case numbers and similar data before anything reaches a cloud model, which matters for client work under NDA.
MentalClone is built for a different job. You upload your reports, proposals, notes and transcripts once, as PDF, Word, Excel, Markdown, EPUB, saved emails or scans, and it answers in your own voice only from that material, saying so when the files do not cover a question. It runs in any browser, and you can send a client a private link that works without an account. The full plan list is on the MentalClone pricing page.
Is Elephas worth it?
Elephas is worth it for a solo Mac user who writes all day and wants an assistant in every app, with the option to keep sensitive data on the device. At $39 a month it gets expensive if the only feature you use is Super Brain, because that is a library you can only query from your own Apple devices. If your aim is a searchable archive of everything you have written that also answers clients, a browser library at $24 a month on yearly billing does more of that job for less.
Mac users weighing a document manager instead of an AI assistant should also read our DEVONthink pricing breakdown, since DEVONthink is a one-time purchase with optional AI on your own API key. And if writing is the actual work, for example a weekly company blog, a dedicated AI blog writer that researches keywords before drafting will fit better than a general assistant.
Which Elephas plan should you buy?
Pick by the one feature you cannot live without. Writing help across Mac apps: Standard at $19. Asking questions across your own files and notes: Professional at $39, since Standard has no Super Brain. Client work under NDA where you need to see exactly what was redacted, or need fully offline AI: Pro+ at $49. If none of those needs to happen inside macOS, and you would rather keep your documents in one library that clients can also ask, start with our AI second brain instead and paste a page of your own writing into the demo at the top of this article.