Msty Pricing and Msty Studio Aurum Cost per Year

Short answer: Msty Studio has a free tier and one paid plan for individuals. Aurum costs $149 per user a year, or $349 once for Aurum Lifetime. Teams and Enterprise start at five seats and are priced on request. None of those prices include the AI itself: you either run a local model on your own hardware or connect a provider such as OpenAI or Anthropic with your own API key and pay them per token.

Msty started as a desktop app for chatting with local and online models in one window, and Msty Studio is the current version. People usually look up Msty pricing at one of two moments: when a free feature they rely on turns out to be limited, or when they try to work out what a year of using it with their own documents will really cost. Both answers are below, with prices taken from Msty's own pricing page.

Msty pricing for every Studio plan

Two details catch people out. First, there is no monthly Aurum price on the page. You pay $149 for the year or nothing. Second, Msty says plainly that it does not run discounts, so waiting for Black Friday will not help. The last change went the other way: in late 2025 Msty raised Aurum from $129 to $149 a year and Lifetime from $249 to $349.

How much does Msty Aurum cost per year?

Msty Aurum costs $149 per user per year, which is about $12.42 a month. Aurum Lifetime is a single $349 payment, so it pays for itself in the third year if you keep using the app. Neither price covers model usage. Online models are billed by their providers through your own API keys, and local models cost you hardware and electricity instead.

That last point is what makes Msty pricing hard to compare. The license is cheap and predictable. The usage is not, because it depends on which model you point it at and how much text you send.

The costs that sit outside the Msty price

Msty is a client. It does not resell model access the way ChatGPT Plus or Claude Pro do. Its documentation describes two ways to get answers: install a local engine such as Ollama, MLX or Llama.cpp and run open models on your machine, or add an online provider and paste in your API key. Either way, the bill for thinking is separate from the bill for the app.

• Online models. Every question you ask a hosted model is metered per token by that provider. Questions over your own documents are the expensive kind, because the retrieved passages are sent along with the question each time. A heavy week of document Q&A on a top model can cost more than a month of Aurum.
• Local models. No per-question bill, but you need a machine with enough memory to run a capable model, and long documents need a larger context window. Msty's own getting-started guide tells you to raise the local model's context length for Knowledge Stacks.
• Your time. Choosing models, embedding settings and chunk sizes for a Knowledge Stack is part of the job. Some people enjoy that. Many professionals who just want an answer from last year's client report do not.

If your team's AI subscriptions and API keys are spread across several cards, it is worth having one place that tracks cloud and SaaS spend before the per-token bills add up unnoticed.

Is Msty free to use?

Yes. Msty Studio Free costs nothing and lets you chat with local and online models, attach files and search your conversations. Knowledge Stacks, the feature that lets the app answer from a folder of your documents, is marked as limited on the free tier, and several studios, including personas, prompts and the MCP toolbox, are limited too. Free is a fair way to test whether a desktop model client suits you.

Msty pricing versus other ways to chat with your own documents

Most people pricing Msty want one thing from it: ask questions of their own files and get answers grounded in them. Here is what that costs a year with Msty and with the tools it is usually compared against.

Msty has the lowest license fee on the list and the only lifetime option. It is also the only one where the real annual cost is unknown until you see your provider invoices. For the details behind the other rows, see our breakdowns of AnythingLLM pricing and Elephas pricing.

When Msty is the better buy

Msty is a strong choice if you like choosing models, want to compare answers from several of them side by side, or need your files to stay on your own disk. With a good GPU or an Apple silicon Mac and local models, Aurum Lifetime is about as cheap as private AI gets: $349 once and no usage bill. It also suits people who already pay for API access for other work and want one desktop client for all of it.

When a flat-priced document library costs less

The picture changes for a consultant, coach or advisor whose main use is asking questions of their own proposals, reports and transcripts, and who would rather not manage models. Add a realistic API bill to Aurum and the gap to an all-in plan narrows quickly, and the setup work never shows up on an invoice.

MentalClone is built for that case. You upload PDFs, Word files, spreadsheets, Markdown, EPUB, emails and scans, up to 100 MB each, into one library with no document cap on Starter or Professional. Each answer picks the documents that best match the question from the whole library, answers only from them in your own voice, and says so when your files do not cover it. Model usage is included in the price, and you can give a client a private link to ask your material without an account. Starter is $49 a month or $288 a year; Professional is $99 a month or $588 a year. See the plans and prices, or ask three questions in the demo at the top of this page first.

The honest limits: there is no local mode, no model picker and no offline use, so if those matter, Msty or an AnythingLLM-style setup is the better fit. If you came to Msty from ChatGPT because a project would not hold all your files, our ChatGPT Projects alternative page compares the file caps directly, and the AI second brain page explains how one library replaces scattered folders.

Msty pricing questions

How much is Msty Studio?

Msty Studio is free to download and use, with some features limited. The paid Aurum plan costs $149 per user a year, and Aurum Lifetime costs $349 per user as a single payment. Teams and Enterprise plans need at least five seats and are priced by Msty on request. Model usage is billed separately by your AI provider.

Does Msty have a monthly plan?

No. Msty's pricing page lists Aurum only as a yearly subscription at $149 per user, or as a one-time Lifetime license at $349. There is no month-to-month option for individuals. If you want to try it before committing, the free Studio tier is the way to test the app.

Is Msty Aurum Lifetime worth it?

Aurum Lifetime at $349 equals about two years and four months of the $149 yearly plan, so it pays off if you expect to use Msty for three years or more. It covers the app only. If you rely on paid online models, your API spending will still be the larger cost over that period.

Do I need an API key to use Msty?

Only for online models. Msty can run local models through Ollama, MLX or Llama.cpp without any key. To use hosted models such as GPT, Claude or Gemini, you add that provider in Msty and paste your own API key. A ChatGPT Plus or Claude Pro subscription does not include API access, so it cannot be used as that key.

Does Msty offer discounts?

Msty says it does not offer discounts, including on Black Friday, and it raised prices in December 2025 rather than cutting them. The free tier is the only way to use it without paying. Enterprise pricing depends on seat count, so larger teams can ask about volume terms.