We Made AI Free on Every Plan. Here's the Math.

A beta user named Ricky — who has used a lot of CRMs — sent us this:

"AI requiring an upgrade to try feels not right and weird. I'm not sure what I would use it for until I try it first. Cap turns or credits and give it for free for a bit to see value."

He was right. So we changed it.

What changed

Every plan in RadiusOS — including Free — now includes AI credits. One credit equals one AI action. The same monthly pool covers deal scoring, drafted follow-up emails, score explanations, contact enrichment, semantic search, the in-product Ask RadiusOS chat, and AI-flavored MCP tool calls from Claude Desktop or Cursor.

• Free: 75 credits per workspace per month
• Pro ($19/mo): 300 credits per workspace per month
• Business ($39/mo): Unlimited (with a fair-use ceiling around 5,000)
• Team ($69/mo): Unlimited (with a fair-use ceiling around 10,000)

And — this is the bigger one — MCP server access is now free for every plan. You can connect Claude Desktop, Cursor, ChatGPT, or any MCP-compatible AI assistant to your RadiusOS workspace from minute one of a free signup. Pure CRM operations (search contacts, create tasks, list pipeline) cost zero credits forever. AI-flavored tool calls draw from your monthly pool.

Why we did it

The argument for gating AI behind paid plans is straightforward: AI calls cost real money. Every Claude API call we make has a per-token bill. If we let free users hit the AI freely, our cost scales linearly with their usage and we lose money on every signup.

The counter-argument — Ricky's argument — is that nobody upgrades for a feature they've never tried. If our positioning is "the AI-powered CRM," then a brand-new user who lands on RadiusOS, signs up free, and hits a paywall the moment they touch AI is going to bounce. They'll never see what we're actually selling.

Notion learned this the hard way. They gave away a 20-action lifetime trial, then in 2025 gated AI to Business+. Our read of the data: their evaluation funnel got worse, not better. Cursor went the other direction — 2,000 free completions per month — and grew rapidly. Linear bundles AI agents into their free tier. The market has split, and the side that wins on adoption is the side that lets you feel the product.

Here's the math

The decision came down to whether the unit economics actually work. The math:

• Each AI call costs us roughly $0.0015 on Anthropic's Haiku 4.5 with prompt caching
• 75 credits × $0.0015 = $0.11 per free workspace per month at maximum usage
• Most free workspaces don't max out — realistic average is closer to 30 credits used = $0.045/wksp/mo
• 1,500 free workspaces × $0.11 worst case = $165/month

We bumped our global free-tier monthly cap from $100 to $200 to absorb the new surface. If the cap is approached, the system gracefully degrades free-tier AI calls to rule-based behavior until the next month — users still get value, we don't lose money.

For paid plans, the math gets even better. Pro at $19/mo with 300 credits costs us about $0.45/wksp/mo on AI — under 3% gross margin impact. Business at $39/mo with unlimited (fair-use 5K) credits costs us $1-2/wksp/mo typical. Both are sustainable at any scale we can actually reach.

What this means for you

If you've been considering RadiusOS but were waiting until you could justify the upgrade to feel out the AI: don't wait. Sign up free, connect Gmail, add a few contacts, and watch the AI score them, draft your follow-ups, and answer questions about your pipeline through the in-product chat. You get 75 credits a month — enough for a real evaluation, not a teaser.

If you're already on Pro and you've been hitting feature walls on chat or score explanations: those are gone. You now have 300 credits to spend across every AI surface, and the in-product AI chat (⌘/) is unlocked.

If you're already on Business or Team: nothing changes for you in cost. Your AI is still unlimited. The only difference: free and Pro users can now connect Claude Desktop too — which means more AI assistants out there learning to work with RadiusOS, which means a deeper ecosystem for everyone.

The principle behind this

Most software treats AI as a premium add-on. We're treating it as the floor. Pure CRM stays free forever because the alternative — counting clicks against a CRUD quota — would feel insulting and would make RadiusOS unusable as a primary pipeline tool. AI is the upgrade. CRM is the floor.

For more on how the credit pool works in practice, see our AI Credits help article. For pricing details and the comparison vs HubSpot, Pipedrive, Attio, and Zoho, see /pricing and /benchmark.

Thanks Ricky.