Flux.ai Pricing in 2026: Plans, AI Credits, and What It Actually Costs

Flux is a browser-based collaborative ECAD platform, and its pricing reflects that positioning: you pay per editor seat, per month, with tiers that unlock collaboration depth and features. On top of the seat price sits AI metering, the copilot’s work is denominated in compute units (ACUs), each plan includes an allowance, and usage beyond it bills as overage. Finally, features gate by plan: Flux’s own FAQ ties editing and exporting private projects, and AI access generally, to paid tiers.

None of this is unusual for collaborative SaaS, but it means the real monthly cost is seats times tier, plus everyone’s AI overage, and it moves with how intensively your team iterates.

At our mid-2026 review of Flux’s public pricing pages, the entry paid plan was about $20 per editor per month with a 10-ACU monthly allowance and overage around $2.50 per ACU; professional plans ran to roughly $140 or more per editor per month, with team tiers above that. Flux has repriced before, materially, so treat these as the shape of the pricing rather than gospel, and check flux.ai/pricing for today’s numbers.

The subtler number is the ACU burn rate, which depends entirely on how you use the copilot. Heavy generation and iterative AI work draw down allowances quickly; occasional assists do not. Two teams on identical plans can see very different bills.

Flux offers a way to try the product without paying, and public projects have historically been the free lane. The walls, per the official FAQ: private projects, exporting, and AI access require a paid plan. For evaluation that is workable; for real work, most engineers hit the private-project and export gates almost immediately, which is the practical difference between "free trial" and "free tier".

If your definition of free includes exporting your own design files indefinitely, Flux’s free lane does not meet it, and it is not really trying to; the product is built to convert teams to seats.

Price a realistic month: seats times the tier your feature needs actually force (private projects push you up), plus a real estimate of AI usage from a two-week trial with the meter watched. Then compare that number against what the alternative stack costs for the same work: for many teams that is zero, KiCad for layout-centric work, ProtoFlow for AI-first capture through routing, both free, both desktop, both KiCad-format compatible with each other.

Where Flux earns its price is genuine multi-editor, same-board, same-time collaboration in the browser. If your team actually works that way, the seats can be worth it. If collaboration means sequential work and reviews, you are paying the collaboration premium for a workflow you do not have.

If what attracted you to Flux was the AI rather than the browser, the free path is ProtoFlow: describe the circuit in plain English, get an editable schematic with real LCSC/DigiKey/Mouser parts, continue into PCB layout with ProtoRoute autorouting, run ERC/DRC, and export Gerbers or native KiCad files. No per-seat pricing, no compute-unit meter, no export gate, projects are local files on your machine.

The honest trade: ProtoFlow is desktop software without Flux’s real-time multi-cursor collaboration. For individuals, students, and teams that review rather than co-edit, that trade is free money; for genuinely synchronous teams, it is the feature you would miss.