Pricing & real costs
We keep pricing honest: free for scientists, and cost-plus-a-small-margin for the infrastructure you actually use. Here's exactly what to expect.
Plans
| Free | Team | Enterprise | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Best for | Academia & government | Biotech & industry | Large biotech / CROs |
| Monthly | $0 | Low per-seat | Custom |
| ELN + inventory | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Keyword search | ✓ (free) | ✓ (free) | ✓ (free) |
| AI chat, assistant & semantic search | Bring your own key, or Managed AI | Bring your own key, or Managed AI | Bring your own key, or Managed AI |
| Managed AI (we run the keys, billed monthly) | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Seats | up to 5 | up to 25 | unlimited |
The free trial
A new workspace runs free on our shared infrastructure until either ~90 days or a storage cap (default 20 MB of notebook data), whichever comes first. After that you connect your own database + storage (free to run at small scale) or stay on our managed infrastructure and pay for what you use.
Real costs after the trial
If you bring your own database + storage (recommended)
You pay your provider directly — usually $0 at small scale:
| Resource | Typical free tier | Then |
|---|---|---|
| Database (Neon/Supabase/Aiven) | ~0.5 GB free | ~$19/mo if you outgrow it |
| File storage (Cloudflare R2) | 10 GB + no download fees | ~$0.015/GB/mo over 10 GB |
We charge you nothing for storage/traffic in this mode — it's your account. See how to set it up.
If you use NextELN's managed storage
Free up to the included tier, then billed cost + margin:
| Resource | Free tier | Overage price |
|---|---|---|
| Managed file storage | 2 GB | ~$0.05 / GB-month |
| Traffic (downloads) | 5 GB / month | ~$0.10 / GB |
| Managed AI (optional add-on) | — | ~$20 / 1M tokens, billed monthly |
You see live usage and any overage on Billing inside the app, and you add a card there. For AI, you get the honest deal: bring your own key and pay your provider wholesale, or turn on Managed AI and we run it for you at our cost plus a small margin — with a spend cap you set, so there are never surprises. Keyword search is always free.
These figures are current defaults and may change; the app always shows your live usage and the exact amount before you're billed. Managed high-availability database clusters are quoted separately at cost plus margin — contact support@nexteln.com.
Why usage-based, cost-plus pricing?
Our model is simple: team up with the specialists who do each job best and pass their wholesale pricing straight to you. We run our code on next-generation platforms and rely on professional managed-database companies for durability, Anthropic and OpenAI for AI, and cloud object storage for files — then hand you their pricing at cost plus a small margin. That's how NextELN is more capable than legacy tools like LabArchives yet costs a fraction of the price.
What that means for you:
- What you pay is what you get. You're buying the same pro-grade infrastructure we do, at close to our cost — no middleman, no markup games, no surprises. The savings are real, and they're yours.
- Yours to keep, yours to move. Bring your own database, storage bucket, and AI key any time. Your data lives on infrastructure you can own, operated by professionals — you control every cost and can leave whenever you like.
The result: a large lab pays a fair amount, a small lab pays little or nothing, and — because the price is fair for everyone — the service (and your research) stays dependable for the long run.