Running costs & pricing

Almost every cost in FitMesh is fixed — the database, the hosting, the domain. Those stay roughly the same whether there are 10 users or 1,000.

The exception is AI. Every time FitMesh calls Claude to parse a food description, scan a workout notebook, read a PDF diary, or generate a daily inspiration message, it costs real money per call. Small amounts — fractions of a penny each — but they add up if someone is hammering the endpoints, or if a bot is scraping the AI features for free.

That is why AI features have daily limits. They are not there to frustrate genuine users — a real person using FitMesh normally will rarely hit them. They exist to stop automated abuse and to make sure the AI costs stay proportional to the subscription revenue that covers them.

FitMesh uses Claude Haiku (Anthropic's fastest and cheapest model) for all AI features. It costs a fraction of a penny per call and is well-suited to structured extraction tasks like reading food descriptions or scanning workout photos.

Costs are approximate and based on Claude Haiku pricing. A real user hitting every limit every day would cost roughly £0.30–£0.50/month in AI calls. A PRO user at full usage would cost roughly £1.50–£2.50/month. In practice, most users use a fraction of their daily limits.

Calculated from real call counts in the database, multiplied by the per-call estimates above. Anthropic doesn't expose a billing API so this is the closest we can get to actual spend — it's accurate to within the variation in prompt length per call.

These figures update each time this page loads. No caching — the numbers you see are live from the database.

Roughly, yes — for a typical user. Here's the honest breakdown:

There are three reasons for AI daily limits, in order of importance:

1. 1.

   Prevent automated abuse

   Without limits, a bot could call the AI endpoints thousands of times a day, running up significant costs. The free limit of 10 food parses per day is more than enough for a human; it stops a script cold.

2. 2.

   Encourage subscriptions to cover AI costs

   Free plan users get a meaningful daily allowance — enough to use every feature genuinely. PRO users get substantially higher limits as part of what the subscription covers. If you're using FitMesh heavily and hitting limits, upgrading is the right move — it directly funds the API calls you're making.

3. 3.

   Keep the free plan genuinely free

   The goal is for the free plan to be useful enough that you actually want to use FitMesh, and for PRO to be worth it if you use it heavily. Limits are calibrated to that — not set artificially low to force upgrades.