AI Code Review Pricing: What You Actually Pay For

AI code review pricing is riddled with the same trick: a free tier engineered to be just bad enough that you upgrade out of frustration, and paid tiers padded with features that aren’t actually shipped. We priced our product the opposite way, and this post explains exactly what you pay for at each level — including where we tell you not to pay us.

If you’ve read The scan we refused, you already know the philosophy. This is the practical breakdown: what each tier includes, what it costs, and how to know which one you actually need.

The pricing most tools use — and why it’s dishonest

The standard model is a slot machine. The free tier runs a degraded scan, shows you “3 of 20 findings,” watermarks the export, or drips you upgrade emails until you cave. The free tier isn’t a product; it’s bait. Meanwhile the paid tiers list features that are half-built, sold as done, on the assumption you won’t notice until you’ve paid.

We reject both halves of that. Our free tier is fully functional within its scope, and we only sell tiers whose features actually work. That has a cost — it makes our pricing page less impressive-looking — but it means what you buy behaves the way the page says.

The free tier: the whole product, capped by size

The free tier is one scan per repo per month, for repositories under 100,000 lines of code. No card, no trial clock, no expiry.

Critically, it is not a degraded scan. It’s the same five agents — security, architecture, dependencies, test coverage, and code quality — the same rules, the same A-F score, and the same prioritised findings that a paying customer gets. The AI code checker and vulnerability scanner run identically whether or not money has changed hands. The only thing the free tier isn’t is bigger than 100K lines.

The ceiling isn’t punitive. It’s economic. Scans cost real money to run — LLM inference, Lambda compute, database writes. At 100K lines that cost is small enough that we can give it away forever and survive. Past that, the maths changes, so we say so, out loud, before you’ve invested any time. If your repo is under the line, the free tier is the product. There’s no catch to find later.

The Standard Audit: paying for size and a written report

When a codebase grows past the free ceiling, or when you need a documented deliverable, the Tier 2 Standard Audit applies. It’s $200–$500 as a one-off — pay once, no subscription, no auto-billing.

What the money actually buys is two things. First, scale: repos of any size, past the free-tier limit. Second, a written report you can hand to someone — an investor doing diligence, an acquirer, an enterprise customer’s security team. A free scan gives you the findings in the dashboard and the pull-request comment; the paid audit packages them into a document that functions as a trust artefact. That’s a real deliverable with a real cost, so it’s priced.

When your free scan hits a repo over the ceiling, the product tells you plainly and points you at this one option. It won’t run a half-scan and bill you for it, and it won’t drip-email you afterwards.

The tiers we haven’t finished — and won’t sell yet

Here’s the unusual part. We have a Team subscription ($300/mo) and a Pro subscription ($500/mo) planned, aimed at recurring multi-repo and multi-team use. They are not finished. Features like Slack and email notifications, multi-team support, and issue-tracker integration are still in progress.

So we don’t sell them yet. Most tools would list “Team” today, ship it with the gaps, and hope you don’t hit them. We’d rather tell you which tier is actually ready and let you decide whether the work-in-progress upper tiers fit your timeline. When those features ship, the price will be defensible. Until then, quoting it as a finished product would be the exact dishonesty we’re trying to avoid. If you’re a larger organisation that needs org-wide coverage now, the right conversation is enterprise, not a half-built subscription.

What you’re actually paying for, in one line each

• Free tier — $0: the full five-agent scan and A-F score, capped at 100K lines, one scan per repo per month. The product, not a teaser.
• Standard Audit — $200–$500 one-off: any repo size plus a written report you can hand to a third party. Pay once.
• Team / Pro — $300 / $500 per month, coming: recurring multi-repo and multi-team workflows, sold only once the features are real.

You’re never paying to un-cripple a deliberately weakened free tier. You’re paying for size beyond the free ceiling, or for a documented artefact, or eventually for recurring team workflows — each a genuine additional thing, not a paywall over something you already had.

How to pick the tier you need

• Under 100K lines, recurring scans: stay free. There’s no reason to pay, and we’ll tell you so.
• Over 100K lines, or need a document: the Standard Audit, once, when you need it.
• Org-wide, multi-team, now: talk to us about enterprise.

For where this pricing sits against other options, our comparison of AI code review tools lays it out feature by feature. And if you want to see the honesty applied to our own code before you trust it with yours, read our self-scan results.

FAQ

Is the free AI code review tier actually usable? Yes. It runs the full five-agent scan with the same A-F score paying customers get, capped at repos under 100K lines, one scan per repo per month. It’s the product, not a degraded teaser.

How much does a code audit cost? The Standard Audit is $200–$500 as a one-off — pay once, no subscription. It covers repos of any size and includes a written report suitable for investor, acquirer, or enterprise due diligence.

Why isn’t there a Team or Pro plan I can buy now? The Team ($300/mo) and Pro ($500/mo) tiers are planned but their features — notifications, multi-team, issue-tracker integration — aren’t finished. We don’t sell tiers that don’t yet work as described.

When should I pay versus stay free? Stay free while your repo is under 100K lines and you need recurring scans. Pay for the one-off audit when you exceed that size or need a written report for a third party.

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Honest pricing means the free tier is the product and you only pay for genuinely more. Point our scanner at your repo, get the full A-F scan in under 60 seconds at no cost, and pay us only when size or a written report actually calls for it.

Try the scanner · read A Secure Vibe-Coding Checklist Before You Ship next · or email codeqa@aivyuh.com. More on the blog.