Plans and billing
The model is simple: nothing about designing is paywalled. You pay for two things, private work and unlimited use of the built-in AI chat. And there is zero markup on AI, ever. You bring your own key and pay your provider directly; Brilliant never takes a cut of your tokens.
Free is for working in public. Personal is for working in private.
Free
Free is a real plan, not a trial. Everything in the editor is yours, with no feature gates:
Every design feature, unlimited.
Unlimited public projects and drops.
Unlimited external agents over MCP. Point Claude Code, Cursor, or any MCP agent at Brilliant and drive it as much as you want.
10 built-in chat messages a day (see below).
2 GB of storage.
The 10-a-day chat cap, explained honestly
On Free, you get 10 messages a day in Brilliant's built-in chat panel. Here is exactly what that means, because it is easy to get wrong:
It counts the messages you type into the built-in chat. One send is one message, no matter how much work the agent does in response.
It applies even when you are using your own API key. This is not Brilliant giving you 10 free AI messages; you are paying your own provider for the tokens. The cap is on the built-in chat feature, not on the AI itself. Your key, your spend, always. (See why the built-in chat is worth paying for.)
It resets at midnight UTC, shown to you in your local time.
Playground demos do not count. Replaying the bundled demos burns nothing.
When you hit the wall, you get two doors:
Upgrade to a paid plan for unlimited built-in chat. The message you were blocked on is held and sent automatically the instant your plan flips.
Continue via MCP. External agents over MCP are unlimited on every plan, including Free. Nothing you send through an outside agent counts against the daily cap.
Personal
Personal is $16/month billed annually, or $20/month month to month. It adds the private half of Brilliant:
Private projects and drops.
Collaborate on private work. Editing a private project needs a paid plan on the editor's side too, and Personal caps a private project at you plus one guest editor (Team lifts this to unlimited editors); details in Collaborate live.
Control what visitors see (show only checkpoints, not live work).
Unlimited built-in chat. No daily cap.
A short handle and the blue badge.
50 GB of storage.
Team
Team is $20 per seat per month billed annually (or $25 per seat billed monthly), with a two-seat minimum. It is Personal for everyone on the team, plus a shared identity that owns the work (so projects survive any one person leaving), one invoice for the whole group, and an admin view. The admin sees usage counts, never the content of anyone's chats or designs. Keys and API bills stay per-designer; Brilliant never marks up AI for teams either. A paid team also lifts the private-project editor limit: unlimited editors on private work, where Personal allows one guest editor. For what a team is and how roles work, see Teams.
Full details and the current numbers live on the pricing page.
Storage
Your quota counts three things: the projects you own (a collaborator's edits count against the owner, not the editor), your drop payloads, and media like images and your avatar. Free personal accounts get 2 GB, and a paid Personal plan gets 50 GB. Team storage is pooled across the whole team rather than counted per seat: a paid team shares 1 TB, and a free team shares 4 GB.
To see where you stand, open web Settings, Plan & billing, which shows a storage meter. On desktop, the /usage command in chat shows your daily AI message usage; storage lives on the web.
At the cap, the behavior is safe and predictable:
Saves are refused, cleanly. Nothing is half-written. You will see a plain message like "Storage full: 2.1 GB of 2 GB used."
Viewing, exporting, and deleting always work. You are never locked out of your own work.
Deleting frees space immediately. Remove something and the room comes back at once.
In a live session, hitting the cap does not kick you out: your edits stay live, they just cannot be saved into the project's history until you free space or upgrade.
Billing mechanics
Checkout runs through Paddle. You can upgrade from the web, or from the in-app upgrade dialog on desktop, which opens checkout in your browser and updates the app automatically once you are done. The app never quotes you a price directly; the current numbers are on the pricing page.
You can cancel any time. A cancellation keeps your plan active until the end of the period you already paid for, then drops you to Free. Your invoices are in Settings.
How team billing behaves
A team's plan is managed from its Plan & billing settings, which only admins can open. It works like the personal plan, with a few things that are specific to buying seats for a group.
Seats prorate one way and defer the other. A team pays per seat, with a two-seat minimum, and you can change the count at any time. Adding seats takes effect immediately: the proration is billed to your card right away and the new seats are usable at once. Removing seats is deferred: nothing is billed now, your current seats stay until your next renewal, and the lower count takes effect then. You can never drop below two seats, or below the number of people already seated, whichever is higher.
Switching between monthly and annual. You can move a team between monthly and annual billing from the plan card. The switch takes effect right away, and Brilliant shows you the new charge on the target cadence before you confirm.
A failed payment gets a grace period. A failed renewal does not cut the team off. The plan enters a grace period in which everything keeps working, and the billing page shows when access ends along with a way to update the card. Fix the card in time and nothing changes. If it is not fixed, at the end of the window the team drops to Free: private projects become view-only and the pooled storage tier falls to 4 GB. Nothing is ever deleted, and updating the card or resuming the plan restores everything.
Invoices. Every charge is listed on the billing page with its date and amount and a link to download the invoice. There is one invoice for the whole team, not one per member.
Pooled usage. Team storage is pooled: every team project draws from the same quota, shared across the whole team, while each member's personal projects keep their own separate quota. The team's Usage settings show the pool as a whole (1 TB on a paid team, 4 GB on a free one) and a per-project breakdown, so an admin can see which projects use the most space, each with its visibility, canvas count, and size.
What happens if you downgrade
A downgrade removes capability. It never destroys your work and never exposes anything that was private:
Private projects and drops become view-only. You can still read, export, or delete them, and you can flip any of them public to resume free editing instantly. Nothing is deleted.
Storage returns to 2 GB. Bytes you already have stay put. If that puts you over the 2 GB line, you cannot save new changes until you free space, but everything already there is safe and you can always delete to make room.
A short handle reverts to the handle you had before you claimed it, and the short one enters a 30-day reclaim window. Reclaiming it needs a paid plan again.
The blue badge disappears.
That is the whole list. A lapse takes away the paid extras and leaves everything else exactly as it was.
Next
Why the built-in chat earns the upgrade: Why pay for the integrated AI chat.
The private work you are paying for: Publish a project.