Simple, honest pricing
Lumen is efficient by design — so Pro costs a fraction of Perplexity or Phind.
Free
$0 / forever
- 30 answers per day
- Live web search + inline citations
- 8 sources per answer
- Follow-up conversations
- Answer caching
- Deep research mode
- API access
Pro ★ best value
$6 / month
- 600 answers per day
- Deeper synthesis (70B-class models)
- 12 sources per answer
- Deep research — multi-step agentic flow
- Public API access (100 calls/day)
- Saved conversation history
- Priority model routing
| Plan | Price | Per-query cost to us | Deep research | API |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Lumen Pro | $6/mo | ~$0 (free-tier routing) | Yes | Yes |
| Perplexity Pro | $20/mo | $0.005–1.30 (token burn) | Yes | Paid (Sonar) |
| Phind Pro | $20/mo | premium models | — | — |
| ChatGPT Plus | $20/mo | premium models | Deep Research | Separate |
Lumen's efficiency moat: self-hosted SearXNG retrieval + free-tier LLM routing means our marginal cost per query is near zero — so we pass the savings on. Cancel anytime.