Plans & billing
How Alcove billing works — a per-writer plan that includes chapter checks, dollars for media and generation, and auto top-up.
Alcove is a per-writer subscription, and what a seat buys is checking: every plan includes a monthly quota of deep verification runs. Beyond that quota, and for work that costs real compute — generating a chapter, producing media, unlocking a premium cartridge — Alcove bills in dollars. Many everyday writing actions are free: localized rewrites, hand-edits, translation, and reading never touch your balance.
You write the chapter in your own agent client, and attaching it costs nothing. The checks are the part you pay for.
We never paywall safety, basic canon memory, or basic data integrity — and locking canon is always free. You never pay to keep a chapter.
What things cost
Every billable action has a fixed, disclosed price that always delivers the full artifact:
| Action | About |
|---|---|
| Deep verification run, past your included quota | $1 |
| Chapter generation, if you use Alcove's instead of your own model | $2.50 |
| Scene art (single character), portrait, narration | $0.25 |
| Scene art (multi-character) | $0.75 |
| Chapter video — movie clip | ~$27.50 |
| Chapter video — montage | ~$20 |
| Premium cartridge unlock | $7.50 |
| Bringing your own chapter (paste or MCP client) | Free |
What stays free
These are bundled, not metered:
- Reading your locked canon (always) and Canon Lock itself.
- Baseline continuity checks on every proposal.
- Localized prose edits — rewrite a passage, restyle voice, re-pace a beat, fix continuity in a span. Iteration should feel free.
- Hand-editing the draft yourself, browser read-aloud, and chapter translation.
- Canon memory, cast, codex hygiene, safety, and basic export.
The plans
Every plan includes a monthly allowance that resets, is spent before your paid balance, and doesn't roll over. The headline number is how many chapter checks it covers.
- Free — $0/mo, one writer. Includes 10 deep checks a month, plus the whole canon substrate, unlimited Canon Locks, unlimited baseline checks, and bring-your-own chapters.
- Pro — $19.99 per writer/mo. Includes 50 deep checks per writer (contradiction catching, rule enforcement, multi-lens review), then $1 each. Add as many writers as you like, priority generation, and early access to new capabilities.
- Enterprise — custom. For studios and imprints: negotiated volume, SSO, invoicing, custom terms, and priority support. See Enterprise below.
Pro can be billed annually with 2 months free — $199 per writer/yr. The monthly included checks are the same either way.
New organizations also get a $5 starting grant to feel the loop before any card exists.
How seats are counted
A seat is an active member of your organization, counted automatically — you are not asked to buy a block of seats up front, and there is no seat limit to manage. Adding someone adds a seat; removing them removes it.
Auto top-up (never buy packs)
When you use more than your included allowance, Alcove can top up automatically: your saved card is charged whenever your balance runs low, under a monthly ceiling you set.
The ceiling defaults to $0, which means auto top-up is off — metered work simply stops at the included allowance until next month. Canon Lock, safety, and canon memory keep running either way. There are no credit packs.
Auto top-up needs a card on file. You can save one from the billing page without buying anything.
Exact prices, increments, and allowances can change as the economy is tuned. Your account billing page is always the source of truth for what you will be charged.
Enterprise
Enterprise is not a self-serve plan and has no checkout button. It exists because studios and imprints need things a price page cannot answer — SSO, a custom DPA, invoicing terms, or a volume of checks that should not be billed at list.
How it works:
- Get in touch at hello@alcove.fi with a sentence about what you're making and how many writers are involved.
- A working demo call. Not a slide deck — we run the loop against a save file that looks like yours, so you can see what the checks actually catch on your material.
- A usage estimate. We size a quota from your anticipated volume: how many chapters a month, how many writers, how much media. You get a fixed quote against that estimate rather than a meter you have to watch.
Everything that is free on Free stays free on Enterprise. Canon Lock, canon memory, baseline continuity, and safety are never negotiated.
Premium cartridge unlocks
Some cartridges are premium and unlocked with a one-time price. Unlocking adds the cartridge to your library permanently. Like everything else, it's a fixed, disclosed price.