Introducing the Cogny Free Tier: 15 Calls on Signup, Then Solo or Cloud

We shipped Cogny's free tier a few weeks ago — and then, in the most on-brand move possible, never wrote it up. The plan picker went live, the metering went live, agents started signing themselves up, and the announcement sat in nobody's backlog. So this post is the backfill: what the free tier is, why we built it the way we did, and how the ladder above it works.

The short version: every new Cogny workspace now starts with 15 free AI calls. No credit card, no sales call, no "book a demo." You sign up, you get 15 metered calls for the month, and you can run a real ad audit against your real data before you ever think about paying us.

Why a free tier at all

Cogny started as a founder-sold product. The classic flow was a ~5000 SEK/mo Cloud engagement, manually invoiced, with a human on both ends of the deal. That works — those founding clients are still with us, on exactly the same unmetered flat terms they signed up for. Nothing in this post changes their bill.

But "talk to a human first" is a terrible fit for how Cogny actually gets used now. The product is a Marketing MCP — most sessions start from an AI client, and increasingly the user is an agent. A coding agent that wants to run a Google Ads audit at 2am does not want to fill in a contact form and wait for a sales reply. It wants to call an endpoint, get a key, and run a query.

A free tier is the only onboarding that survives that. So we built one that an agent can complete by itself, and that a human can complete in the time it takes to read this paragraph.

The 15-call gift

Every new workspace gets 15 free MCP calls a month, plus a small one-time credit gift that powers in-app chat and image generation so you can try those too. Connect Google Ads, ask "which campaigns are wasting spend," and you're working off the gift — no card required.

Fifteen is deliberately enough to prove the thing works on your data and not much more. You can connect a channel, run an audit, pull a Search Console query report, and see a real finding. That's the job of the free tier: get you to one genuine "oh, that's useful" moment without a payment wall in front of it.

There's nothing to migrate when you upgrade — the balance that held your 15 free calls simply becomes whatever your new plan includes. No reset, no "export and start over."

When the gift runs out: Solo or Cloud

Once you've spent the gift, you commit to one of two plans. They're shaped for two genuinely different users.

Solo — $9/mo

Solo is for the individual operator who brings their own agent — Claude Code, Cursor, a custom script — and wants Cogny's marketing data on tap. The standard MCP tools — Google Ads, GA4, Search Console, Meta, and the rest — are unmetered under fair use. When your own agent calls them, it's paying for its own inference, not ours, so there's no credit counter to watch; the $9 just covers the connection.

What bills, on the other side, is anything Cogny itself pays a provider for. Our in-app chat runs the model on our dime, so those messages draw from a top-up balance you load on demand — keep credits on hand to keep chatting, and an empty balance pauses in-app chat until you top up. (Every new workspace starts with a small signup credit gift, so you can try it before you buy.) The same balance covers the opt-in actions that cost us per call without running our model at all — image generation, media analysis, and Brave-powered search / rank-tracking. The rule is simple: if we pay a provider for it, it meters; if your own agent drives it, it doesn't.

Top-up credits are priced the same way as everywhere else and don't expire month-to-month. Bring your own agent and live in the MCP tools, and $9 is the whole bill; lean on our in-app chat, and you pay for the tokens you actually use.

Cloud — $499/mo

Cloud is for teams running Cogny as shared infrastructure. It includes 2000 credits every month — enough for a team's daily reporting and analysis — plus a rolling top-up balance for months you run hot. Every cost-driving action drains the included balance first, then top-up.

The credit model is meant to be legible. Credits map to real usage, not seats: a cheap, fast call costs about a credit; a long conversation over a big context costs more — and you can see what each action drew. There's no seat tax and no "enterprise" markup, and because the price tracks what the underlying models actually cost, it moves with them instead of drifting into a margin you can't see.

Top-ups come in $20 / $50 / $100 / $200 denominations and never expire month-to-month, so a heavy week doesn't strand you mid-analysis.

Why credits instead of seats

The obvious alternative was per-seat pricing. We didn't do it, for one reason: the user is often not a person. When a Claude Code agent signs up, runs an audit, and hands a report to its human, "how many seats is that" is a meaningless question. So we price the cost we actually incur — our own model inference, plus the paid providers we call on your behalf — and leave your own agent's tool calls unmetered. That's fair to a one-person shop and an agent swarm alike.

It's also the only model we can explain without lying. Seat pricing forces you to guess "how many people will use this" and then over- or under-pay forever. Credits map to usage: a heavy month spends more of them than a light one, and the conversion is the same for everyone — no negotiated "enterprise" rate, no seat multiplier.

An agent can sign itself up in one command

This is the part we're proudest of. With the Cogny CLI, the entire free-tier onboarding is one command:

alias cogny="npx @cogny/cli"
cogny init --agent claude-code

That creates a workspace, grants the 15 free calls, and writes a cogny_lite_* key to ~/.cogny/config.json. The next command connects a data source. If the agent already holds a key — Bing Webmaster Tools is API-key-only — it brings its own, no human and no OAuth round-trip:

cogny tools call set_integration_token \
  --input '{"integration_name":"Bing Webmaster Tools","fields":{"token":"<bwt-api-key>"}}'

For an OAuth source like Google Search Console, the agent doesn't get stranded either — it fetches the consent link and hands it to a human to click, instead of bouncing the user into a setup wizard:

cogny tools call start_integration_oauth \
  --input '{"integration_name":"Google Search Console"}'
cogny status   # subscription tier, connected channels, remaining credits

The signup itself needs no human and no dashboard — an agent reads the tool list, claims its 15 calls, and connects whatever it already has a key for. OAuth sources still need a person to approve the link, but the agent drives even that step. And when it runs out of free calls, cogny status tells it exactly where it stands.

That's the whole thesis behind the free tier: onboarding that an autonomous AI can complete is also the smoothest onboarding a human has ever had. The 15-call gift is the front door, Solo and Cloud are the two rooms behind it, and the credit meter is the only number anyone has to trust.

Start free: app.cogny.com — or point your agent at npx @cogny/cli init.