[Verified] Bolt's free tier gives you 300,000 tokens a day with no rollover, and Pro drops to US$18 a month on yearly billing

Bolt is a chat-to-website builder. You describe an app, it writes the full stack, and it hosts the result. The pitch is aimed at non-engineers who want a working MVP without hiring anyone. We read bolt.new/pricing and the Bolt support centre ourselves, and this piece is about what we found, not what the marketing says.

Our angle: the free tier is real and usable, but it has a daily ceiling that most first-time users hit faster than they expect. And the Pro price you see on the page is not the only price Bolt is willing to charge.

What the free tier actually gives you

Bolt bills in tokens. A token is a chunk of text, roughly a word fragment, and every message you send plus every line of code Bolt writes back consumes them. The pricing card and the FAQ on the same page both state the same two caps for free users:

• 300,000 tokens per day
• 1,000,000 tokens per month

Both caps apply at once. Even if you never touch the daily limit, the monthly one still cuts you off.

Beyond tokens, the free plan includes public and private projects, unlimited databases, website hosting with up to 333,000 web requests, and a 10MB limit per uploaded file. Every site you publish carries Bolt branding. That is not a small footnote if you plan to show the site to a client or an investor.

The support centre adds the detail that the pricing page leaves out. Free-tier tokens reset on the first day of each calendar month. Unused free tokens do not carry over. Paid plans get rollover. Free does not.

One thing Bolt does not publish anywhere we could find: what happens the moment you hit the daily cap. The page only says that upgrading removes the daily limit. So you should assume a hard stop mid-session, not a slowdown.

The paid ladder, and the price the page hides

Pro is US$25 per month, billed monthly. It starts each month with 10,000,000 tokens and has no daily cap. It removes the Bolt branding, raises the file upload limit to 100MB, lifts hosting to 1M web requests, and adds custom domain support, SEO boosting, private site sharing, expanded database capacity, a choice of database provider, and AI image editing. The higher-performance Bolt Agent setting, listed as Speed High and Intelligence High, is Pro only.

Rollover is where Bolt’s own pages disagree with each other. One place says unused paid tokens carry over one month. Another says up to two months. We could not reconcile the two, so plan around the shorter one.

Teams is US$30 per member per month, billed monthly. A member here means one seat, one login. On yearly billing the page shows an average of US$27 per member per month. Enterprise has no published price. You have to ask.

The page banner says “Save up to 28% with yearly billing” and shows Pro at an average of US$18 per month on the yearly plan. Note the word average. Bolt does not print the yearly total on the visible page, and we will not calculate one for you.

Now the part readers will not get from the vendor. The pricing page embeds JSON that includes a set of Stripe discount codes tied to a feature flag named “cancellation-save-flow”. Translated: these are offers shown to people trying to cancel. The list includes 33% off for one month, 50% off for one month, 33% off for three months, 50% off for three months, a US$9 Lite plan, and a 30-day pause. None of this is advertised, and Bolt publishes no conditions for getting any of it. We are not telling you to fake a cancellation. We are telling you the US$25 sticker is softer than it looks, and a Lite tier exists that the page never mentions.

Where the daily cap bites

Bolt’s chat is verbose by design. Each request re-sends context about your project, so a large codebase costs more tokens per message than a small one. A fresh landing page might get you through a whole afternoon on 300,000 tokens. A multi-page app with a database and auth can chew through the same budget in a handful of prompts, especially when Bolt has to rewrite several files to fix one bug.

That means the free tier behaves very differently depending on project size. Small and early, it feels generous. Once the project grows, the daily wall arrives early in the session and the monthly cap of 1,000,000 tokens is only about three heavy days away.

☀️ AMO, the budget-minded cat

The question that matters to me is whether free is enough, and for a surprising number of people it is. If you want to test an idea, build a one-page site, or learn what conversational coding feels like, 300,000 tokens a day and 1,000,000 a month is a real allowance, not a demo. You also get hosting with 333,000 web requests and unlimited databases without paying anything. Plenty of tools charge for hosting alone.

The catch is the branding. Every free site says Bolt on it. If the site is for you, ignore it. If it is for a customer, that alone pushes you to Pro. The 10MB file limit is a second nudge if you work with images or video.

On paying: US$25 a month billed monthly is the honest price. The US$18 figure is a yearly-billing average, so you are committing for a year to get it, and Bolt does not print the yearly total. Do not sign up for the annual plan on your first day. Use the free tier until you hit the cap two or three days in a row, then decide.

And keep the hidden offers in mind. Bolt’s own page carries codes for a US$9 Lite plan, a 30-day pause, and 33% or 50% off for one to three months. They are attached to the cancellation flow, with no public terms. I would not build a budget on them. But if you ever cancel, read the screen slowly before you click through.

🌙 PIMI, the performance-minded cat

I care whether the thing works, and the free tier is a genuinely worse product, not just a smaller one. The Bolt Agent at its Speed High and Intelligence High settings is marked Pro only. Free users get the basic agent. On a chat-driven builder, agent quality is the whole product. Weaker output means more retries, and more retries burn the same 300,000 daily tokens faster. The free tier punishes you twice.

The daily cap is the real performance problem. Building is iterative. You prompt, look, correct, repeat. Hitting a hard stop at 300,000 tokens in the middle of a debugging loop means losing your train of thought until tomorrow. Bolt does not even document what the stop looks like. Pro removes the daily cap and gives you 10,000,000 tokens a month, so a session ends when you decide it ends.

Pro also fixes the deployment side. A custom domain, 1M web requests, 100MB uploads, private sharing, and a choice of database provider are what you need to ship something real rather than a prototype. The rollover helps too, though Bolt’s pages cannot agree on whether it lasts one month or two.

Teams at US$30 per seat, billed monthly, adds admin controls, centralized billing, SSO and audit logs. For a solo builder that is overhead. For two or more people sharing projects, it is the correct tier.

Verdict: who should use it, who should skip it

Use the free tier if you are testing Bolt, building small personal projects, or learning. The 300,000 daily and 1,000,000 monthly token caps are enough for that, and hosting is included. Just accept the Bolt branding and expect the daily wall on bigger projects.

Pay for Pro at US$25 a month if you are building for a client, need your own domain, or keep hitting the daily cap. The better agent and the no-daily-limit rule are the real reasons, not the feature list.

Take the yearly plan only after a month on monthly billing. The US$18 average is attractive, but the total is not printed and a year is a long commitment on a tool that changes its plans.

Skip Bolt if you are an engineer who already lives in a code editor. The tokens go fast on large codebases, and the chat interface is built for people who do not want to touch files.

And remember: the pricing page carries unadvertised codes for a US$9 Lite plan and 30 to 50 percent discounts. Bolt has room to move on price. It just does not say so out loud.

Written: 2026-09-12 Price last verified: 2026-09-12 Tool last health-checked: 2026-09-12

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📎 Sources

All prices and quotas in this article come from AMPM’s verified dataset for Bolt (last verified 2026-09-12); primary sources:

• https://bolt.new/pricing
• https://bolt.new

🐾 Meet the cats: AMO and PIMI

AMPM is a Taiwan-based AI-tool pricing watchdog. Our motto: ask before you subscribe. Two cats argue every tool from two sides:

• ☀️ AMO — the budget-minded cat. Always asks: is the free tier enough, and is paying actually worth it?
• 🌙 PIMI — the performance-minded cat. Cares about whether it works well, fast, and gets your job done.

When they are done arguing, you know whether to pay. Every number is checked by us, with the verification date at the end.

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