Emergent sells five plans. Free costs $0 with 10 credits a month, Standard $20 a month with 100 credits, Pro $200 a month with 750 credits, and Business and Enterprise are priced on request. Paying yearly brings Standard down to $17 and Pro to $167 a month. The line that changes the real bill is not on the plan cards: every app you keep deployed costs 50 credits a month, so on Standard, one live app uses half of the monthly allowance.
This guide goes through each plan, how credits are consumed and topped up, what mobile apps require, and three realistic monthly budgets. All figures come from Emergent's pricing page and help center, checked on September 13, 2026.
Emergent plans at a glance
| Plan | Monthly | Billed yearly | Credits a month | What it adds |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | $0 | 10 | Core platform features; no mobile apps, private projects, GitHub or custom domain |
| Standard | $20 | $17 a month | 100 | Web and mobile apps, private projects, GitHub integration, custom domain, extra credits, task forking |
| Pro | $200 | $167 a month | 750 | 1M-token context window, Ultra thinking, system prompt editing, custom AI agents, high-performance computing, priority support |
| Business | On request | On request | Not published | Role-based access control, SSO, shared team workspaces, real-time co-editing |
| Enterprise | On request | On request | Not published | User-level credit limits, audit logs, self-hosted database, SLA, deployment in your own cloud (VPC) |
Two price grids online
Emergent's FAQ page still lists an older grid: a free tier with 5 credits, a $10 Starter plan with 50 credits and top-ups at $10 for 50 credits. Many third-party articles quote it. The pricing page and the Plans and Credits help article show the current plans above. When the two disagree, trust the pricing page, and check it again on the day you subscribe.
How Emergent credits work
Emergent meters all AI work in credits. In the words of its Plans and Credits help article, everything from chat prompts to full app generation consumes them: generating and modifying code, frontend and backend work, testing and debugging, integrations and cloud deployments. Emergent does not publish a fixed cost per task, so what a feature takes depends on its size and on how many correction rounds it needs.
- Monthly credits reset. The credits included in a plan are renewed at each billing cycle. Unused ones do not roll over.
- Top-ups never expire. Extra credits are one-time purchases on paid plans, from $1 for 5 credits up to $1,000 for 6,000 credits, and they stay on the account until used.
- Price per credit. Standard and small top-ups both work out to $0.20 per credit; Standard billed yearly and the largest top-up pack bring it to about $0.17. Pro comes to about $0.27 per included credit: you pay for its features (context, custom agents, compute), not for cheaper credits.
The hidden line: 50 credits a month per deployed app
Deploying is not a one-off charge. Emergent bills 50 credits a month for each deployed app, which covers the managed infrastructure, monitoring, SSL and environment variables. At the Standard rate of $0.20 per credit, that is about $10 a month per live app, taken from the same pool you use to build.
- One live app on Standard: 50 credits for hosting, 50 left for changes.
- Two live apps on Standard: the whole 100-credit allowance goes to hosting, and every change is paid in top-ups.
- Ten live apps on Pro: 500 of the 750 monthly credits go to hosting.
Budget hosting separately
Before choosing a plan, count the apps you intend to keep online, multiply by 50 and subtract the result from the monthly allowance. What remains is your real building budget.
Mobile apps on Emergent
Emergent's Mobile Agent builds Expo apps, and its help center is explicit: the Mobile Agent is only available on paid plans, from $20 a month, not on the free tier. The free plan card on the pricing page mentions web and mobile experiences, but the mobile documentation and the plans table both reserve mobile apps for Standard and Pro.
Publishing follows the standard Expo route, run from the downloaded project: install the EAS command-line tool, launch one build per platform (Emergent's guide counts 15 to 40 minutes each on Expo's cloud machines, no Mac needed), then submit with EAS using a Google Play service account key and an App Store Connect API key. Those steps use your own Expo, Apple and Google accounts, which means two costs outside Emergent: Apple's Developer Program at $99 a year and Google Play's $25 one-time registration. Expo's free plan covers 15 iOS and 15 Android builds a month. Our guide to creating a mobile app without coding compares how other builders handle this path.
What Emergent really costs: three budgets
These are calculations from the published figures, for one builder, before taxes.
| Scenario | Plan | Credits used a month | Monthly cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| Test an idea, nothing deployed | Free | Up to 10 | $0 |
| One live web app, a few changes a month | Standard | 50 hosting, 50 building | $20 ($17 billed yearly) |
| Two live web apps, regular changes | Standard plus top-ups | 100 hosting, 100 building | About $40 |
The pattern: on Emergent, the subscription buys credits, and every app you keep online draws on the same pool. If you plan several live apps, compare plans on the credits left after hosting, not on the credits included. Add the store fees above if one of them is a mobile app.
How Cadrant prices the same job
Cadrant is an AI app builder too, and it splits the bill differently. The Starter plan costs $20 a month and includes 200 credits, unlimited projects, hosting and a custom domain, with no monthly credit charge per published app. A credit is the unit of generation: roughly 10 credits create or modify an app. Native mobile apps, built with Expo and React Native, are available from the free plan, and Starter adds guided publishing to the App Store and Google Play from your own accounts, plus code export and GitHub integration.
The two credit units are not comparable one to one, so the fair comparison is structural: on Emergent, each live app costs credits every month; on Cadrant, hosting is part of the plan. For the wider market, including Lovable and Base44, see our AI app cost breakdown, and for native mobile, the mobile app builder page.
Before you subscribe
- Count the apps you will keep online and reserve 50 credits a month for each.
- Check whether you need mobile apps, GitHub, private projects or a custom domain: none of them are on the free plan.
- Cover peaks with top-ups rather than upgrading to Pro for credits: each Pro credit costs more.
- Re-check the pricing page on the day you pay: Emergent has changed its grid before.
In short: Emergent's plan cards read simply, $0, $20 and $200, but the monthly bill depends on how many apps you keep deployed. Reserve 50 credits per live app, add the store fees if you publish a mobile app, and count what is left as your building budget.