Pricing & real costs

We keep pricing honest: free for scientists, and cost-plus-a-small-margin for the infrastructure you actually use. Here's exactly what to expect.

Plans

	Free	Team	Enterprise
Best for	Academia & government	Biotech & industry	Large biotech / CROs
Monthly	$0	Low per-seat	Custom
ELN + inventory	✓	✓	✓
AI search & assistant	✓ (on us)	✓	✓
Vector (semantic) search	✓	✓	✓
Bring your own LLM (Claude/OpenAI)	—	✓	✓
Seats	up to 5	up to 25	unlimited

The free trial

A new workspace runs free on our shared infrastructure until either ~90 days or a storage cap (default 20 MB of notebook data), whichever comes first. After that you connect your own database + storage (free to run at small scale) or stay on our managed infrastructure and pay for what you use.

Real costs after the trial

If you bring your own database + storage (recommended)

You pay your provider directly — usually $0 at small scale:

Resource	Typical free tier	Then
Database (Neon/Supabase/Aiven)	~0.5 GB free	~$19/mo if you outgrow it
File storage (Cloudflare R2)	10 GB + no download fees	~$0.015/GB/mo over 10 GB

We charge you nothing for storage/traffic in this mode — it's your account. See how to set it up.

If you use NextELN's managed storage

Free up to the included tier, then billed cost + margin:

Resource	Free tier	Overage price
Managed file storage	2 GB	~$0.05 / GB-month
Traffic (downloads)	5 GB / month	~$0.10 / GB
AI tokens (Claude/Voyage)	1,000,000 / month	~$20 / 1M tokens

You see live usage and any overage on Billing inside the app, and you add a card there. Free individuals' AI is covered by us; Team/Enterprise bring their own AI key, so AI tokens are billed by your provider, not us.

These figures are current defaults and may change; the app always shows your live usage and the exact amount before you're billed. Managed high-availability database clusters are quoted separately at cost plus margin — contact support@nexteln.com.

Why usage-based, cost-plus pricing?

Hosting bandwidth and AI tokens are real costs. Rather than hide them, we pass them through at cost plus a small margin, so a large lab pays a fair amount and a small lab pays little or nothing. And because you can always bring your own database, storage, and AI key, you stay in control of every cost.