Assist pricing
A penny a question. The first 250 are free.
You pay for answered questions and nothing else. No plans, no seats, no per-page fees. Search is free and unlimited, and the free tier is hard-capped, so it can never bill you.
No credit card required to sign up.
Start free, stay free if you're small
One allowance, one rate
Every site gets 250 answered questions a month: plenty for a personal site, a blog or a small product's docs. Past that, usage is deducted hourly from the same prepaid balance as the rest of Edge, against a budget you set.
Free allowance
$0/ month
Everything you need to put cited answers on a small site. No card required.
- 250 answered questions every month
- Up to 500 pages of content per site
- Instant search, unlimited
- Citations, conversations and streaming
- Human handoff to your inbox
- Widget, hosted page and suggested questions
- Question log and metrics
- “Powered by Edge Assist” badge
Beyond 250
Pay as you go$0.01/ answered question
Switches on when you add a card. $10 per 1,000 questions, with an optional monthly cap.
- Everything in the free allowance
- Up to 10,000 pages per site
- No Edge badge
- Bucket ingestion and private knowledge bases
- Extended conversations at 2× the question rate
- Cache pre-warming at $0.01 per question
- White-label add-on: $29 per site a month
The rate card
One unit you pay for
An answered question is the only metered unit. Everything else is free or a flat add-on. All Edge pricing.
| Resource | Price | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Answered questionsAI answers grounded in your content | $0.01 per question | First 250 a month free. $10 per 1,000. |
| SearchInstant type-ahead results | Free | Unlimited on every tier |
| Content ingestionSite index, bucket or URL | Free | Automatic re-ingestion included. Bucket ingestion and private access need pay-as-you-go. |
| Extended conversationsLonger threads, deeper memory | 2× question rate | Optional per-site setting, on deep turns |
| Cache pre-warmingAnswer likely questions ahead of time | $0.01 per question | You choose the size of each run, e.g. 250 or 1,000 |
| White-labelYour assistant name and icon | $29 per site / month | Badge removal alone comes with any paid usage |
| Overrides and answer cachePinned facts, curated Q&As, cache purge | Free | Included on every tier |
Calculator
What would your site cost?
Slide to your monthly question volume. The Edge figure is exact; the others are published starting prices for comparison.
02,00020,000100k
Searches are free and unlimited, so only count questions that get an AI-written answer.
Edge Assist, per month
$17.50
(2,000 − 250 free) × $0.01 = $17.50
No card on file? Answers stop at 250, the widget falls back to search, and you pay $0.
The same volume elsewhere
Indicative- ChatbaseCredit-based tiers$40–150/mo2.3–8.6× Edge
- InkeepPlan tiers~$150+/mo8.6×+ Edge
- Kapa.aiAnnual contract~$500+/mo29×+ Edge
- Intercom Fin$0.99 per resolution + Intercom plan$1,980/mo113×+ Edge
Published starting prices at the time of writing; check each vendor for current terms. Fin assumes every answer counts as a resolution and excludes the Intercom plan it requires.
Hard caps
Hard caps
When the free answers run out, search keeps going
Without a card on file, the free tier is a hard stop. The widget pauses AI answers, keeps instant search working, and picks up again when the month resets. With a card, pay-as-you-go carries on against a budget you set, and hitting that budget does the same thing.
- Never a surprise invoice
- Search stays free and unlimited at the cap
- Answers resume on the 1st, or as soon as you add a card or top up
Worked examples
What real sites pay
You pay for answered questions beyond the free 250. For the docs site: 2,000 − 250 = 1,750 billable questions × $0.01 = $17.50.
| Site | Content | Questions | Monthly cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| Personal site or blog | 60 pages | 180 / month | $0.00Within the free allowance |
| SaaS docs site | 400 pages | 2,000 / month | $17.501,750 billable questions |
| Help centre at scale | 3,000 documents | 20,000 / month | $197.5019,750 billable questions |
Sites over 500 pages need pay-as-you-go for the higher ingestion ceiling. Dedicated AI-answer products typically start at $40–500+ a month before a single question is asked; see the comparison.
FAQ
How billing works
Something not covered? Ask the Assist team.
What counts as a question?
One AI-composed answer. Searches are free and unlimited; you only pay when Assist writes an answer. Each follow-up in a conversation counts as one question.
Do repeat questions cost anything?
Yes. Repeat questions are served instantly from your site's answer cache, but they still count. The cache makes answers faster and more consistent; it isn't a billing discount.
What happens when I use up the free allowance?
The widget falls back to instant search and stops writing AI answers until the month resets. With a card on file, pay-as-you-go covers the extra questions at $0.01 each; without one, the free tier can never bill you.
How am I billed?
Usage is metered and deducted hourly from the prepaid balance you use for other Edge services, against a budget you set. No subscription, no seats, nothing to cancel.
What is cache pre-warming?
A paid feature: Assist reads your content, drafts the questions visitors are likely to ask, and answers them into your cache before anyone asks. You review the list first, each answer meters at the normal rate, and it can re-warm when your content changes.
Can Assist power a private, internal knowledge base?
Yes. Bucket-backed sites are private by default: anonymous requests are rejected, and access comes from per-site API keys and short-lived visitor tokens your server mints. It's included with pay-as-you-go.
What if I have more than 10,000 pages?
Talk to our Expert Services team. Deployments beyond the self-serve cap get a dedicated design, with per-prefix access controls and retrieval tuned to your corpus.
Can I remove the Edge Assist branding?
Any paid usage removes the “Powered by Edge Assist” badge. The white-label add-on ($29 per site a month) goes further, with your own assistant name and icon.
AI answers for a penny a question
250 answered questions free every month, unlimited search and citations on everything. No credit card required.
Free to sign up. Nothing on Edge silently starts billing.