Quick answer: Onyx AI’s software is free under its MIT-licensed Community Edition. Its managed Onyx Cloud plan is $20 per user per month billed annually ($25 month-to-month). Pricing for the Enterprise Edition is custom. But the license price only covers the software. Self-hosting the free Community Edition still means paying for GPU or cloud infrastructure, DevOps or MLOps engineering time, and ongoing maintenance. None of these show up on Onyx’s pricing page. By Onyx’s estimate, building a comparable stack yourself takes 2 to 4 months of engineering time for initial setup alone, plus infrastructure that ranges from $3,000 to $5,000 for a small team to $120,000 or more for a large one. That gap between license cost and total cost of ownership (TCO) is the real number to plan around. It’s the gap a fully managed platform like GoSearch is built to close.
Onyx AI’s Published Pricing
How much does Onyx AI cost?
Onyx AI has three tiers. Onyx offers the Community Edition for free under an MIT license. It supports unlimited users and includes core chat, RAG, agent, and connector features. You must host the software yourself, according to Onyx’s GitHub repository. Onyx’s pricing page lists Cloud, its managed hosting option, at $20 per user per month with annual billing or $25 month-to-month. There’s no seat minimum and no mandatory support fee on this tier. Onyx quotes Enterprise Edition individually. The plan adds SAML SSO, on-premises and region-specific deployment, white-labeling, custom integrations, invoice billing, volume discounts, and dedicated SLA-backed support.
Third-party pricing aggregators (Capterra, SaaSworthy, Software Finder) list older figures like $16/seat/month. Onyx’s current published rate as of September 2026 is $20 (annual) / $25 (monthly).
What’s the difference between Onyx Cloud and the Community Edition?
Functionally, not much. Both include the same chat interface, agents, RAG pipeline, and 40+ connectors. The difference is who runs the infrastructure. Community Edition is self-hosted. You deploy it on your own Docker or Kubernetes environment and manage uptime, upgrades, and scaling yourself. Onyx hosts the same software through Onyx Cloud, so you pay a per-seat fee instead of managing the infrastructure yourself. Enterprise-only features (SSO, RBAC at scale, white-labeling, dedicated support) aren’t included in either the free Community Edition or the standard Cloud Business plan. They require the separate Enterprise license.
What does Onyx Enterprise Edition actually cost?
Onyx doesn’t publish an Enterprise price; it’s quote-based. One data point comes from Onyx’s AWS Marketplace listing for Enterprise Edition. The listing says Onyx bills customers for two factors on the same invoice: user count and the number of separate Onyx instances. That means an organization running three regional instances pays for all three on top of its user count, a detail that’s easy to miss when budgeting off the $20/seat headline.
The Real Cost of “Free”: Self-Hosting Onyx’s Community Edition
Is Onyx AI’s Community Edition really free?
The software license costs nothing. Your team still pays to run the system in production. Onyx’s self-hosted LLM guide is candid about this. Teams that assemble a full self-hosted stack should expect 2 to 4 months of engineering work for the initial setup, plus ongoing maintenance. Onyx’s documentation states plainly that self-hosting “requires more operational overhead compared to the Cloud offering.” Onyx generally recommends Cloud unless compliance or data-sovereignty requirements call for self-hosting.
How much does self-hosting Onyx cost in infrastructure alone?
Onyx publishes its own GPU cost estimates for teams that want to run models locally rather than through cloud APIs:
- Small team (5–20 users): a single high-end GPU or Mac Studio, roughly $3,000–$5,000 one-time
- Mid-size team (20–200 users): an H100-class server or multi-GPU setup, roughly $25,000–$35,000 one-time
- Large team (200–1,000+ users): multi-GPU clusters or reserved cloud GPU capacity, $120,000–$500,000 one-time, or $8,000–$20,000 per month on cloud GPU instances
These estimates cover model-serving hardware only. They exclude the vector database, authentication layer, monitoring, and the engineering time to wire it all together, each of which is a separate line item in a DIY stack.
How much engineering time does self-hosting Onyx require?
Teams that build around Onyx’s open-source core typically add an inference engine, vector database, custom data connectors, and a separate identity provider. According to Onyx’s comparison of the DIY approach versus its integrated platform, this “works well for indie hackers and small teams that want customization” but “doesn’t work well for organizations that want to deploy AI for end users quickly, or for teams without dedicated DevOps/MLOps resources.” Upgrading one component in a self-assembled stack can also break another. That risk creates ongoing maintenance costs rather than a one-time setup expense.
When does self-hosting break even against paying for a managed plan?
For a mid-size deployment, Onyx cites a 6-to-12-month break-even for self-hosted GPU inference versus cloud API costs, assuming moderate usage. That math is specifically about model inference costs, not the platform itself. It doesn’t include the engineering time to build and maintain the surrounding RAG and connector stack, which is the part most teams underestimate going in.
Onyx AI Pricing vs. GoSearch
Is GoSearch a lower-TCO alternative to self-hosting Onyx?
For teams that want grounded AI search across company data without taking on the self-hosting work, GoSearch removes the infrastructure and engineering line items from the calculation entirely. There’s no GPU procurement, no DevOps hire, and no 2-to-4-month build-out. GoSearch runs on a hybrid, real-time federated architecture, so queries pull live data from connected systems instead of requiring a team to stand up, secure, and maintain a separate vector database and indexing pipeline. The ongoing work of maintaining and updating a DIY RAG stack accounts for a meaningful share of Onyx’s self-hosted cost.
GoSearch prices per seat with published, flat pricing rather than a quote-only Enterprise tier. The number on the pricing page is closer to the number on the invoice. The trade-off is one Onyx is upfront about in its own documentation. Self-hosting buys maximum infrastructure control, which some organizations genuinely need. Teams choosing based on total cost, time-to-value, and not wanting to own the operational overhead of a self-hosted AI stack are the ones GoSearch is built for. For a more in-depth breakdown, see a comparison of GoSearch vs. Onyx.
How does Onyx AI’s pricing compare to Glean?
Onyx doesn’t only compare itself to fully managed platforms. It also markets against Glean, another indexed enterprise search platform. In Onyx’s published cost breakdown, a 250-seat deployment of Onyx Cloud runs about $60,000 a year ($180,000 over three years), versus an estimated $182,000–$220,000 a year for Glean ($601,000 over three years) based on publicly reported Glean rates ($45–$65/user/month base, plus a ~10% support fee and reported $50,000–$60,000 contract minimums). At 500 seats, Onyx separately estimates savings of roughly $600,000 over three years versus Glean. Onyx built these estimates from public reports rather than confirmed Glean quotes, so treat them as directional. It’s a useful data point on how Onyx frames its own value, but it’s a comparison between two indexed, self-hosting-capable platforms, not a comparison against a fully managed alternative like GoSearch.
Key Takeaways
- Onyx Community Edition is free and MIT-licensed, but “free” refers to the software license, not total cost of ownership.
- Onyx Cloud costs $20/user/month annual ($25 monthly) with no seat minimum; Enterprise Edition is custom-quoted and bills on both user count and instance count.
- Self-hosting realistically costs 2–4 months of engineering time plus $3,000 to $500,000+ in infrastructure depending on team size, per Onyx’s own published guidance.
- Self-hosted inference typically breaks even against cloud APIs in 6–12 months, but that timeline covers model costs only, not the surrounding RAG and connector engineering.
- A fully managed platform like GoSearch removes the infrastructure and engineering line items from the TCO calculation entirely, trading self-hosting control for published, flat per-seat pricing and no build-out time.
- Onyx currently has no published third-party reviews on G2 or Capterra to independently verify satisfaction or hidden costs at scale.
