Here's how we thought about it.
The free tier: 50 models/month
50 is enough for a solo engineer or student to evaluate chatCAD seriously over a month. It's not enough to run a production workflow — that's intentional. We want free users to hit the limit, feel the pain, and upgrade because the product genuinely saves them time.
We considered lower limits (10, 20) but our early testers told us they needed at least 30 to prototype a real part family. 50 gives comfortable headroom.
The Starter plan: $9/month for 300 models
At $9 a month, this is below the threshold where most engineers need finance approval. It's a solo-developer-buys-it-on-a-credit-card price.
300 models covers roughly one serious project per week — a realistic cadence for a designer iterating on a product.
Why Lemon Squeezy instead of Stripe
We're a small team and we're not yet a registered company. Lemon Squeezy is a Merchant of Record — they handle global VAT, invoicing, and payment disputes. That means we can accept payments from engineers in Germany, the UK, Canada, and Australia without setting up a VAT registration in each country.
The fee is 5% + $0.50/transaction, higher than Stripe's 2.9% + $0.30. But when you add the accountant fees, VAT compliance software, and time to deal with disputes, Lemon Squeezy is significantly cheaper for our stage.
When we hit $5k MRR we'll evaluate whether to migrate to Stripe with a proper legal entity.
Add-ons instead of feature gating
We deliberately don't gate features behind plans. All plans get access to STEP, GLB, PDF, DXF, and assembly support. What changes is the quota — how many models you can build per month.
Add-ons (Top-up packs, Priority Worker access) let heavy users pay for extra capacity without forcing them into a plan upgrade they don't need.
Questions about pricing? Reach out — we're happy to discuss custom arrangements for teams and enterprises.