Is Braintrust free? What it actually costs in 2026
Yes, there is a free tier — with limits.
Free tier for individuals with limited monthly spans. Paid plans are per-seat — commonly around $249/month for a small team on the pro tier — plus usage-based charges once trace volume grows. Enterprise pricing is negotiated. The per-seat model is what makes it expensive for teams where many engineers touch prompts occasionally.
When paying is still the right call
Stay if the dashboard is doing real work for a team that would not otherwise look at evaluation at all. A hosted UI that a product manager can read is worth more than a CLI nobody outside engineering runs, and Braintrust's trace-to-test-case workflow — pulling a real production failure straight into your regression set — is genuinely well built. Stay while your seat count is small. The tools below assume someone will own evaluation as engineering infrastructure rather than as a product surface.
What you are locked into
Low. Test cases and scoring functions are your own logic in your own repository, and the SDK integration is thin. The genuinely sticky part is historical trace data, which is worth exporting before you cancel because comparison against past runs is most of the value. Plan an export, not a migration.
If you would rather not pay: Promptfoo
Promptfoo
Prompt regressions fail the build. Declarative evals that live in CI.
Free and MIT, unlimited seats. An enterprise tier exists for larger organisations.
See all 5 Braintrust alternatives comparedCompare the free options head-to-head
Pricing is verified against the vendor's published figures and dated above. Vendors change prices — confirm current numbers with Braintrust Data before you commit. More llm evaluation & testing decisions on Macrostack.