Two separate bills, and keeping them straight explains most of the pricing.

What you pay Operator

One subscription, Operator Pro, billed weekly, monthly or yearly. Every cadence is the same full product; the only difference is how often you are charged. Current prices are on the pricing page, which reads them from the same place checkout does.

It starts with a 7 day free trial and no card. You get the whole product during it.

What you pay your model provider

Everything the agents actually think with. Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, xAI or whoever you gave a key to bills you directly at their rate.

Operator adds nothing to this and never touches it. There is no Operator proxy, so there is no margin to add.

If you would rather pay nothing here, run local models with Ollama. Slower, capable enough for a lot of real work, and free.

What you might pay someone else

If you run boxes on your own cloud, that cloud bills you. Same principle: you connect the account, you pay the provider, Operator resells nothing.

Managing the subscription

Everything is in your account: change cadence, update the card, or cancel. Cancelling leaves you with access until the end of the period you paid for.

What happens when it lapses

The Mac app stops starting new work. Nothing is deleted. Your sessions, files, memory and audit log are on your Mac and stay there. Resubscribe and everything is where you left it.

Keeping the cost down

The subscription is fixed. The variable part is tokens, and two habits move it more than anything else:

1. Write a clear instruction. A vague task makes an agent explore, and exploring is most of what a surprising bill is made of.
2. Use a smaller model where it fits. Summarising, drafting and classifying rarely need the most expensive model available.