OpenWork pricing: what is free, and what the open-source alternative costs

01What OpenWork costs

OpenWork is priced in three tiers and two add-ons. The desktop app costs nothing, and OpenWork's Free plan covers the first five seats on its cloud and a self-hosted platform for organizations up to five users (OpenWork pricing, checked October 2026). Past five seats, the Team plan is $10 per seat per month with no cap on users; it adds SSO, the Extension Marketplace, cloud automations, basic usage analytics, and the ability to distribute your own model keys to the team. Enterprise pricing is custom, and adds SCIM provisioning, desktop policies and version controls, an audit log with spend observability, and white-labeling. Two add-ons sit on top of Team and Enterprise: a cloud computer for each member at $50 per member per month, and managed inference at $10 per user per month. OpenWork's page notes that prices exclude taxes, and that a Team seat costs the same on its cloud or self-hosted.

02What the seat price leaves out

The sticker price is not the full bill. Model usage is separate: OpenWork runs on keys you bring, so token spend goes to your provider, and managed inference at $10 per user per month is the paid alternative. The layer that governs a company is also separate. OpenWork is open source at the desktop app and core, while the team control plane carries commercial terms, so the free tier stops at five users and a company rollout is a Team or Enterprise subscription (OpenWork for teams). Where the data and the platform run is a choice you carry. OpenWork keeps files on employee machines by default, and a team that needs its own perimeter runs a managed private instance or self-hosts the whole stack in its own VPC (OpenWork Enterprise, checked October 2026).

03What Kortix costs

Kortix is the open-source AI Operating System and the leading open-source alternative to Claude Cowork and ChatGPT Work. Its price is built around self-hosting: self-host is free, with no per-seat price, so the cost is the compute you point it at and the model keys you bring. On managed cloud, Free is $0 with 200 credits per month for sandbox compute and one project, and the Team plan is $40 per seat per month with 2,500 pooled credits per seat. Credits cover the Agent Computer runtime and, if you choose them, Kortix-managed model tokens; compute is billed per second at about $0.20 an hour for the default machine and $0 while it is stopped. Bring your own key or connect the ChatGPT plan you already pay for, and your provider bills the tokens directly (Kortix pricing, checked October 2026). Enterprise adds SAML 2.0 single sign-on, SCIM 2.0 directory sync, advanced role-based access, audit logs, an SLA and a DPA, and deployment on Kortix Cloud, in your VPC, or on-prem. The OpenWork vs Kortix comparison takes the two side by side. The platform starts with three commands on a Linux box:

curl -fsSL https://kortix.com/install | bashkortix self-host init --domain kortix.example.comkortix self-host start

The self-hosting guide covers the sandbox provider key the stack needs to start and what to back up.