Emergent Credits and Hosting Costs, Explained
How Emergent credits work, what each plan includes, why hosting costs 50 credits a month per app, and when self-hosting your Emergent app costs less.
Emergent charges for work in credits. Credits pay for building, and they also pay for keeping apps online. This guide explains how the numbers fit together, using Emergent’s published pricing and help center.
What each plan includes
| Plan | Price | Credits per month |
|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | 10 |
| Standard | $20 ($17 billed annually) | 100 |
| Pro | $200 ($167 billed annually) | 750 |
| Business / Enterprise | Custom | Custom |
GitHub integration and private project hosting start on Standard. Enterprise adds options like VPC deployment and self-hosted database support.
Where credits go
Building. Every agent action uses credits, and bigger tasks use more. Debugging and iterating by prompt add up quickly.
AI features in your app. If your app uses Emergent’s universal LLM key to call GPT, Claude or Gemini, that usage is billed through Emergent credits too.
Hosting. Emergent’s help center lists deployment at 50 credits per month for each deployed app.
The hosting math
On Standard, 100 credits a month works out to about $0.20 per credit. So:
- One deployed app uses 50 credits, half of the Standard plan, every month.
- Two deployed apps use all 100 credits before you build anything.
- Everything else you do that month needs extra credits or a bigger plan.
Try your own numbers in the credits calculator.
When self-hosting costs less
Moving off Emergent makes financial sense when:
- You keep one or more apps live for months at a time.
- You buy extra credits or moved to Pro mainly to keep building.
- Your AI features run through the universal key and you’d get better pricing, limits or terms on your own provider account.
- You need staging environments, which on your own stack cost a small server rather than another deployed app.
On your own infrastructure, a FastAPI + React app and a small MongoDB database typically run on a single server plus a managed database, for a fixed monthly bill that doesn’t change with every deploy or prompt.
Keep building with AI afterwards
Leaving Emergent doesn’t mean giving up AI-assisted development. The code is standard React and FastAPI, which tools like Cursor and Claude Code work with well, without a per-action credit meter.
Ready to see what the move involves? Read the step-by-step Emergent migration guide.