eliza
Open source agentic operating system
The Lens
By Erik Loyd, SaaS CEO and former COO/CFO of an AWS Premier Partner.
Updated Sep 2026
elizaOS started as a framework for AI agents and now calls itself an agentic operating system. It's a runtime for agents that act across your chat apps, email, calendar, browser and wallet, plus a consumer Eliza app for web, desktop and mobile. It ships memory, document ingestion and connectors for Discord, Slack, Telegram, WhatsApp and X, and works with OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, Grok, OpenRouter or local models through Ollama. MIT licensed.
Running it yourself is real work. The repo pins Node 24 and Bun, you bring model keys or run local models, and turning a demo into something reliable is a project, not an afternoon. Eliza Cloud is now the hosted route: sign-in, model routing and agent deployment, billed on credits. Its pricing sits behind a login.
Solo builders who want control over their agent stack: a strong start. Teams that want a library rather than a whole runtime should look at mastra-ai/mastra or LangChain. Larger teams get the same code with no license ceiling.
The catch is churn. The last stable npm release is from January, the repo's main branch is a v2 beta, and third-party plugins are no longer accepted, so older tutorials break. The official docs also carry tokenomics pages for an elizaOS crypto token.
Free vs Self-Hosted vs Paid
free self hosted paid cloudFree tier: The framework and app code are free under MIT: agent runtime, memory, document ingestion, chat connectors, CLI and a local model registry for on-device inference.
Self-hosted: Bring your own LLM keys or local models, and your own infrastructure. The repo pins Node 24 and Bun. The official deploy guide covers Docker, Railway and Phala (confidential compute); anything else is on you.
Paid (Eliza Cloud): Optional hosted service for accounts, model routing and agent deployment, billed on prepaid credits. Pricing is behind a login and not published. The open-source cloud code bills running agents by the hour and passes model costs through with a platform markup, but treat those constants as indicative, not a price list.
The real cost: LLM tokens. Every agent burns them continuously, and that bill dwarfs hosting for most setups.
The framework is free and MIT. Eliza Cloud hosting is credit-billed with no public price list; your real bill is LLM tokens.
What to do by team size
- Solo
- free; self-host, or try Eliza Cloud credits to skip the ops
- Small team
- free; self-host if you want control of the stack
- Medium team
- free; budget real engineering time for production hardening
- Large team
- free; pin a version, because the main branch moves fast
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