DeepEval Pricing Explained (2026) - What You Actually Pay

DeepEval pricing splits cleanly in two. The framework is free forever under Apache-2.0, and for a lot of teams that is the whole story. The Confident AI cloud is where the money lives, and it has a genuine 10x cliff you should see coming. Let me decode both, walk a worked bill, then point at cheaper picks if the cloud steps sting.

Keep the two products straight. DeepEval is the open-source framework - the closest thing to pytest for LLM apps. You write test cases, assert on metrics, and run deepeval test run in CI. Confident AI is the paid cloud built on top for dataset management, monitoring, reporting and governance. Both DeepEval and the DeepTeam red-teaming framework are Apache-2.0 and usable with zero account.

The pricing model, decoded

The OSS framework is $0. The cloud has four tiers, and the shape is what matters.

Tier	Price	Spans	Projects	Notes
DeepEval (OSS)	$0	n/a	unlimited	Apache-2.0, self-host
Free (cloud)	$0	1 GB-month	1	5 test runs/week, 2 seats
Starter	$200/mo	5 GB-month	5	then $1/GB-month
Team	$2,000/mo	75 GB-month	unlimited	then $1/GB-month
Enterprise	Contact sales	unlimited	unlimited	SSO, custom

The quota unit on the cloud is trace spans measured in GB-month, plus seats and projects. The free cloud tier is stingy - 5 test runs a week is enough to try the UI and nothing more.

The trap is the jump from Starter to Team. It is a straight 10x - $200/mo to $2,000/mo - with no middle tier. Starter gives you 5 GB-month of spans and 5 projects; Team gives you 75 GB-month and unlimited projects plus governance. There is a nuance worth knowing, though - overage on Starter is only $1 per GB-month, so if what you are outgrowing is span volume, you can often stay on Starter and pay overages rather than leap to $2,000. The real reason to jump is if you need unlimited projects or team governance, not raw usage. An annual discount exists per the vendor, but the exact percentage is not published.

Estimate your bill

Three cases, plus the hidden cost.

Framework only. $0. You run DeepEval in CI, judge locally, and never open the cloud. This is where most teams should start.

Small team on Starter. $200/mo gets you unlimited seats, 5 projects and 5 GB-month of spans. Say you use 12 GB-month - that is 5 included plus 7 extra at $1/GB-month, so $207/mo. Still on Starter, still cheap. The $200 is more a platform-access floor than a usage ceiling.

Team that needs governance. Once you need more than 5 projects or role-based governance, you are on Team at $2,000/mo. That is the cliff, and it is real - budget for the step, because nothing catches you between $200 and $2,000.

The hidden cost. Nearly every DeepEval metric is LLM-as-judge, so every test case fires another LLM inference. A big suite racks up API bills that have nothing to do with the Confident AI subscription, and runs take minutes not seconds. That cost is easy to forget and easy to underestimate. Cost-model the judge calls separately before you scale.

Cheaper alternatives if the cloud cliff hurts

If the $200-to-$2,000 gap is a problem, or you want the cloud UI without Confident AI’s steps, two options fill the space.

Braintrust is the other eval-first platform, and its Pro tier at $249/mo sits right in the gap DeepEval leaves empty. It is the most turnkey regression-testing tool - autoevals scorers out of the box, and CI/CD quality gates that block a merge on a statistically significant regression, with no per-seat charge. The catch is its own meter - it bills “processed data” in GB counting every byte, with no hard spending cap, so verbose agents can blow past $249. Set billing alerts on day one. Full decode in Braintrust pricing.

Langfuse is the cheapest path if observability plus evals is the goal rather than pytest-style testing. It is MIT-licensed and self-hosts free, or $29/mo managed, and at 1M events a month it runs about $101/mo. You assemble more of the regression orchestration yourself than with DeepEval or Braintrust, but the cost is a fraction. See Langfuse pricing.

So which one?

• Your team writes Python and thinks in tests - DeepEval, living in the free Apache-2.0 framework as long as you can, with the judge-call API cost modelled up front.
• You want turnkey regression testing without the 10x cloud cliff - Braintrust at $249/mo, billing alerts on from day one.
• You want the cheapest self-hostable observability plus evals - Langfuse.

For the wider field, see DeepEval alternatives and the three-way DeepEval vs Promptfoo vs Braintrust. Every price here was read from confident-ai.com on 26 July 2026. This category ships breaking changes monthly, so we re-verify every 30 days.