llm-space

Free

Everything that ships today. MIT license, both desktop editions, the Linux server build, the local runtime with models, tools, skills, MCP, and plugins, plus the generator that turns a thread into a runnable LangGraph agent. No account, no seat count, no gated features. The project is funded by sponsors and donations.

Paid

Nothing from the project. Your bill is model tokens paid straight to whichever provider you point it at. Worth knowing before you take the setup advice at face value: the README recommends ByteDance's BytePlus Coding Plan as the default model provider, and BytePlus is the project's gold sponsor. The repo describes itself as "cloud-ready for managed agents," but no hosted tier and no pricing exist today.

Self-Hosted Costs

Not really self-hosted, since it is a desktop app. The standard edition is about a 27 MB download and the performance edition about 130 MB; both share ~/.llm-space, so you can install either or both. Building from source needs Bun 1.3 or newer, or mise if you want the exact toolchain CI uses. The recurring cost is API spend, and it is easy to underestimate: an agent loop that retries, replays, and re-evaluates burns tokens considerably faster than chat does. Watch a long debugging session on a frontier model and you can clear $10 to $20 without noticing.

When to Pay

Pay when you outgrow one machine. Hosted platforms like LangSmith, Langfuse Cloud, and Weights & Biases Weave sell shared traces, dataset versioning, and production monitoring across a team, generally per seat or per trace. LLM Space does not try to be that, and its file-based threads make sharing a run a manual step. Also pay attention if you are not on a Mac, because the desktop app is macOS only and the Linux artifact is a headless server build.