Savings vs API pricing
Open Free Max prices the work your agents did against public per-model API rates and compares it with what your subscription costs — the concrete number behind "subscription, never the meter".
The Savings tab turns consumption into money: what the same work would have cost on a metered API, against what your subscription actually costs.
What it shows
| Figure | Meaning |
|---|---|
| API-equivalent | What the measured tokens would cost at public per-model API rates |
| Plan share | The share of your monthly subscription attributed to the period |
| Saved | The difference |
The footer states the honest caveat directly: estimate — not a bill.
Where prices come from
Per-model prices come from a public pricing catalog, refreshed in the background and cached locally, with a built-in snapshot shipped in the app so the feature works offline and on first launch. The panel shows which catalog date is in use, or built-in snapshot when it has not refreshed yet.
That refresh is the single network call in the whole usage subsystem: a read-only GET of a public JSON file. It is not an LLM call, it is not billed, and it is best-effort — if it fails, the embedded snapshot is used.
What you have to declare
One field: Your plan ($/month). Everything else is measured or catalogued.
Leave it at zero and the comparison treats your subscription as free, so the savings figure includes the entire plan cost. Enter your real monthly price and the number becomes meaningful.
Why this number exists
Open Free Max’s core constraint is that agents run in interactive mode on your subscription, never through a metered API — see Subscription vs API. That constraint shapes the whole product: no headless mode, no SDK, keystroke-driven CLIs, a rules engine instead of a scripted API loop.
The Savings tab is where that architectural decision becomes a figure you can look at. Spend a heavy week across several parallel sessions and the gap between “plan share” and “API-equivalent” is the entire argument, measured on your own machine.
Frequently asked
- Is the savings figure a bill?
- No. It is an estimate. Model prices come from a public catalog and your plan price is whatever you enter, so treat the number as an order of magnitude, not an invoice.
- Why does OFM ask for my monthly plan price?
- Because it cannot know what you pay. Left at zero, the comparison counts the whole subscription as free and overstates the savings.