Braintrust Pricing: Complete 2026 Breakdown & My Honest Take

Braintrust pricing starts at $0 and jumps to $249/month on the Pro plan. The Starter plan works until you exceed data and score limits. Once you do, overages kick in. This breakdown covers every plan, what you get, and which one fits your team.

Braintrust Pricing Plans: At a Glance

Braintrust offers three pricing tiers.

Starter if you're an individual developer or small team building and testing. Pro if you're running production applications and need observability at scale. Enterprise, if you're a large organization with compliance or data residency requirements.

Here's how the three plans compare on price, usage limits, and cost controls:

Real cost example: A Pro team logging 10 GB/month and running 100k scores pays $249 + $15 (data overage) + $75 (score overage) = ~$339/month.

Braintrust Pricing Plans Breakdown

The numbers in the table tell you what each plan costs. Here's what each plan actually means in practice.

Starter: $0/month

What's included: You get 1 GB of processed data and 10,000 scores per month, with 14-day retention and unlimited seats across users, projects, datasets, playgrounds, and experiments.

Each project gets one human review scorer, plus Loop agent access, OAuth, MFA, community support, and spend alerts at 80%, 90%, and 100% of your limits. A credit card isn't needed to get started.

Best for: Solo developers building their first eval pipeline or small teams that need unlimited seats without per-user costs.

Pros:

• Unlimited users, projects, and datasets with no seat tax at any tier
• Full access to core tracing, logging, experiments, and Loop agent from day one
• Spend alerts fire before overages hit

Cons:

• 14-day retention isn't long enough for production regression tracking or audit trails
• Only 1 human review scorer per project, which doesn't work for multi-scorer eval workflows

Pro: $249/month

What's included: Builds on Starter with 5 GB of processed data, 50,000 scores, and 30-day retention. You also get custom charts, environments, topics, and playground annotations.

Human review scorers go from 1 per project to unlimited, RBAC is available for basic roles, and support moves to priority email with a click-through DPA included.

Overage rates drop on Pro: $3/GB vs. $4/GB on Starter, and $1.50 per 1k scores vs. $2.50 on Starter.

Best for: AI engineering teams running automated eval pipelines in production, or orgs that need environment tagging and a click-through DPA for basic compliance.

Pros:

• Custom charts and environments give production teams the observability depth Starter lacks
• Lower overage rates reduce costs once you exceed the included limits
• Unlimited human review scorers vs. the 1-per-project cap on Starter

Cons:

• There's no mid-tier: Teams that outgrow Starter go straight to $249/month with nothing in between
• No hard spending cap means you'll exceed that amount without realizing it

Enterprise: Custom Pricing

What's included: Adds the compliance layer that Pro doesn't cover. Custom data retention, S3 export, SAML/OIDC single sign-on, and role-based access control. Plus a negotiated data processing agreement, a Business Associate Agreement for HIPAA, and a SOC2 attestation.

Support shifts to a dedicated Slack channel with guaranteed SLAs and custom legal terms. Deployment can be on-prem or hosted, with billing annually.

Best for: Large orgs handling regulated data in healthcare or finance that need a BAA, custom DPA, or on-prem deployment for data sovereignty.

Pros:

• BAA and custom DPA make it the only tier that's viable for HIPAA-regulated environments
• Custom retention and S3 export cover audit trails that Pro's 30-day limit can't support
• Dedicated Slack channel and guaranteed SLAs for teams where downtime has a direct cost

Cons:

• Pricing is only available after a sales call, which makes it hard to evaluate ROI before getting internal approval
• Annual invoicing only, with no monthly option for teams with variable budgets

Which Braintrust Plan Should You Choose?

Most teams start on the Starter plan and hit the 14-day retention limit before they hit the data cap. That's usually what pushes you to upgrade.

Choose Starter if you:

• Are still evaluating whether Braintrust fits your eval workflow
• Have data volume under 1 GB/month and don't need custom dashboards
• Don't need to track regressions across more than two weeks of production data

Choose Pro if you:

• Run automated evals as part of your regular shipping process
• Need environments to separate dev, staging, and production traces
• Want no per-seat cost regardless of team size

Choose Enterprise if you:

• Are in healthcare or finance and need a BAA or custom DPA, and neither exists on the lower tiers
• Require SAML SSO or data outside Braintrust's shared infrastructure
• Need custom retention for compliance or audit requirements beyond 30 days

Is Braintrust Worth the Cost?

Braintrust is a well-built platform. The eval infrastructure is solid, the tracing is detailed, and having experiments, datasets, and prompt management in one place saves time. Whether the pricing structure aligns with how your organization operates in practice is a separate question.

For teams building voice or chat AI on top of an LLM stack, Braintrust pricing covers the prompt evaluation side. But teams typically have to pair it with another tool for end-to-end conversational testing that single-turn evals miss.

The value is clearest on Pro if your team runs evals continuously. Custom environments and version-controlled datasets matter once you're shipping AI features weekly. If you're tracking quality over time, $249/month is defensible.

Braintrust is worth it if you:

• Run automated eval pipelines on a live product and need dataset versioning and scoring.
• Have 3+ engineers on AI features. The unlimited seat model means the per-person cost drops fast.
• Are in a regulated industry where Enterprise's BAA and custom DPA are hard requirements on that tier.

Skip Braintrust if you:

• Are a team of 1-2 who've outgrown Starter but can't justify jumping straight to Pro. The pricing gap has no middle ground.
• Do high-volume tracing where usage-based overages will consistently push your bill well above the base price.
• Need a self-hosted deployment without an Enterprise contract. Braintrust doesn't offer it at that level.

The platform pays for itself if your team is serious about eval quality at scale. For everyone else, the gap between free and paid is the biggest friction point in Braintrust's pricing.

Braintrust Alternatives & Pricing Comparison

Braintrust sits in the LLM evaluation and observability space alongside several tools, each covering a different part of the workflow. Here's how pricing stacks up:

Cekura + Braintrust: Testing the Full Stack

Braintrust evaluates LLM outputs. Cekura tests whether your conversational agent actually works end-to-end.

Braintrust tells you whether your prompt produced the right output. Cekura tells you whether your agent completed the booking, handled the interruption, or stayed on script when a user pushed back. Single-turn evals miss what simulations catch.

They solve different problems. For teams building voice or chat AI, you likely need both.

Use Braintrust when you need:

• Prompt evaluation and regression tracking across model changes
• Dataset versioning and CI/CD quality gates on LLM outputs
• Production tracing and observability across your full LLM stack

Use Cekura when you need:

• Pre-production simulation of your agent across hundreds of scenarios
• Production monitoring for alerts, call analytics, and quality metrics on live conversations
• Automated QA for your CI/CD pipeline, where test runs trigger automatically on prompt changes
• Predefined and custom metrics with built-in latency, instruction-following, and tool-call tracking, plus define your own
• Customer satisfaction metrics to track CSAT and drop-off points to find where your agent loses callers
• SOC 2, HIPAA, and GDPR compliance for transcript redaction, role-based access, and audit trails

Native integrations work out of the box for Retell, VAPI, ElevenLabs, LiveKit, Pipecat, Bland, and more. The integration adds a testing and observability layer on top of what you already have.

Use both, and you've got prompt evaluation and conversational QA covered. Book a demo and see how it tests your agents before they reach production.

My Bottom Line on Braintrust Pricing

The pricing gap is real, and Braintrust knows it. That's why they built a free tier with enough room to test the platform before spending anything. The bet is that by the time Starter feels limiting, you're invested enough to justify paying for Pro.

That bet pays off for most teams. If you're building conversational agents, though, it's worth asking what Braintrust doesn't test before committing. Cekura covers the conversation layer that prompts evals to miss.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Braintrust Free to Use?

Yes, Braintrust has a free Starter plan with no platform fee and no credit card required.

It includes 1 GB of processed data, 10,000 scores, and 14-day retention per month. The free tier is sufficient for early evaluation, but 14-day retention limits its usefulness for production regression tracking.

How Much Does Braintrust Pro Cost?

Braintrust pricing on Pro is $249/month flat, with no per-seat fees. That includes 5 GB of processed data, 50,000 scores, and 30-day retention.

Overages are billed at $3/GB and $1.50 per 1,000 scores. There's no hard spending cap, so a busy month can push the total bill.

Does Braintrust Offer a Free Trial?

No, Braintrust doesn't offer a time-limited free trial. It offers a permanent free tier instead. You can use the Starter plan indefinitely without a credit card. When you upgrade to Pro, you're charged a prorated amount for the remainder of that billing month.

What's the Difference Between Braintrust Starter and Pro?

The main difference between Starter and Pro is the observability layer.

Pro adds custom charts, environments, custom topics, and playground annotations that Starter doesn't have. That covers raising the human review scorer limit from 1 per project to unlimited and dropping overage rates from $4/GB to $3/GB.

Does Braintrust Charge Per User?

No, Braintrust doesn't charge per user on any plan. All tiers include unlimited users, projects, datasets, playgrounds, and experiments. Costs are based on processed data volume and scores rather than on headcount.

Can I Self-Host Braintrust Without an Enterprise Contract?

No, self-hosted deployment is only available on the Enterprise plan. Starter and Pro run on Braintrust's shared cloud infrastructure. If data residency or on-prem deployment is on your list, you'll need to contact sales for Enterprise pricing.

Is Braintrust HIPAA Compliant?

Braintrust is HIPAA compliant only on the Enterprise plan, which includes a Business Associate Agreement (BAA). Starter and Pro don't include a BAA, which means they're not viable for handling protected health information (PHI) in regulated healthcare environments.