pricing
working together
should be universal
Working with an AI, or working with your friends, usually means somebody sitting in the middle running a meter. Seamside uses a model you pick and machines you already own, and your people connect to you directly.
There is no middle, so there is nothing to meter.
On Replit, every always-on app is its own $15 a month. A $25 subscription covers one of them.1
Your second app costs more, and so does your third. There is no reason for that to get leaner, because the size is the bill.
It runs on a machine you already own, so there is no per-app price at all. One frame or fifty, you pay the same.
They are also built small. A frame runs in around ten megabytes, where a hosted app reserves hundreds, so one machine holds dozens of yours where it would hold one of theirs.
People are seats. Bolt's team plan is $30 a month for each member, and the allowance comes per member rather than shared. Vercel charges $20 a month for every person allowed to deploy.2
The more of you there are, the more it costs to be in the room.
Nobody is counting. You invite people and their devices talk to yours directly. There are no accounts, so there is no seat to buy.
Share a whole space with five people or five hundred, or put one frame on the open web for anyone to open.
You pay per attempt. On Lovable the same credits buy the building, the hosting, and the AI your app calls once it is live, so all three compete for one pot.3
The more you create, the more they make.
We do not charge for making things. Use any AI you like. Run one on your own machine for nothing, use somebody's free tier, or pay a provider directly. That money never comes to us.
Which points our incentive the other way round. We are actively working to make each build cost less to produce, which is better for your wallet and for the power it burns.
Your work lives in their database. Getting it out means whatever export button they decided to build. What you made, and everything it knows about you, sits somewhere you cannot look.
Their free tier also has opinions about what you may make with it. On Vercel, adding a donate button makes your site commercial.4
It is files on your disk. A frame is HTML in a folder. Its data is a database on your own machine. There is nothing to export, because none of it left.
Our rules run to four lines, and not one of them is about whether you make money.5
All because it runs on your hardware, not ours.
1replit.com/pricing, reserved VM, smallest tier. Checked August 2026.
2bolt.new/pricing: Teams is $30 per member per month, and token allowances are per member rather than pooled. Vercel Pro: $20 per month per deploying seat, viewers free. Replit caps collaborators instead, at 5 on Core and 15 on Pro. Checked August 2026.
3Lovable credits and usage: one credit balance covers build usage, Cloud usage (hosting, database, storage), and the AI Gateway calls a published app makes. Replit and Bolt meter the same way, in credits and tokens. Checked August 2026.
4Vercel fair use guidelines: Hobby is non-commercial only, and asking for donations counts as commercial use, as does being paid to build the site. Checked August 2026.
5Our acceptable use policy: do not harass people, break the law, infringe anyone's rights, or distribute malicious code.
what it costs to run
Four ways people actually run Seamside. None of the money below comes to us.
| your setup | what you pay, and to who | what that gets you |
|---|---|---|
| just your phonenothing else running | nothingto anyone | Open anything shared with you. Join spaces and use frames your people host. |
| a laptop, plus your phoneswhere most people start | nothingto anyone | Make and host your own frames. Share them anywhere on the web, live whenever your laptop is awake. |
| a machine you leave ona mini PC, a Pi, an old desktop | 40¢ to $4 a monthto your power company6 | Always reachable, on hardware you already own. Move a running frame onto it without breaking a share link. |
| a small VPS insteadif you would rather not run a box | $4 to $12 a monthto whichever host you pick | Always reachable from anywhere. One small server holds dozens of frames, and adding another costs nothing. |
6About $5 to $50 a year, at the US average of 18.4 cents per kWh. A Raspberry Pi idles near 3 watts, which is 40 cents a month. A Mac mini idles at 4 watts, about 55 cents. An old desktop tower can sit at 30 watts or more, closer to $4.
so, the short version
Everything on Seamside is free today. Eventually we plan to charge a small fee for unlimited hosts.
One host device, and everything you do on it.
- One host device, forever
- Every phone and tablet you connect to it
- Everyone you share with, however many that is
- Every frame and every space, no limits
- Your own AI, local or hosted, or none at all
- No account, no tracking, nothing leaves your devices
About that much, per month, whenever you want more than one always-on machine.
- Everything in the free column, still free
- As many always-on host devices as you like
- One price for all of them, never a price per host
Free until we build it. Run as many hosts as you like in the meantime. One host device stays free when the time comes.