Costs

Lakehousecat deployments involve three cost categories. In most production environments, API and LLM provider costs are the dominant cost driver, followed by infrastructure, with subscription fees being the smallest component. All three scale with usage and user growth.

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1. API and LLM Provider Costs

Lakehousecat integrates with external AI providers to power chat, analytics, and speech-to-text functionality. These costs are typically the largest variable in a Lakehousecat deployment and scale directly with usage.

Supported providers:

Provider	Capabilities
OpenAI	Chat, Speech-to-Text
Anthropic	Chat
Google	Chat, Speech-to-Text
Azure (Azure OpenAI)	Chat, Speech-to-Text
AWS (Bedrock / Transcribe)	Chat, Speech-to-Text

Customer Responsibility

The API keys used to call these providers belong to the customer. This means:

• The customer registers their own API credentials with each provider
• Costs for API calls (tokens processed, audio transcribed) are billed by the provider directly to the customer
• Customer data — including parts of queries and data source content — is sent to the configured providers as part of normal operation
• Lakehousecat does not monitor or limit API spending on the customer's behalf

Provider pricing structures change frequently. Customers are responsible for monitoring their own API usage and costs using the provider's native tooling (e.g., OpenAI usage dashboard, AWS Cost Explorer).

API costs scale with usage

As user count and query volume grow, API costs grow proportionally. High-concurrency scenarios (many users querying simultaneously) can produce significant API spend. Customers should configure provider rate limits and spending alerts to avoid unexpected charges.

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2. Infrastructure Costs

Lakehousecat is deployed as a Kubernetes Operator on the customer's own Kubernetes cluster. Lakehousecat provides the Operator software — the underlying infrastructure is fully customer-managed.

This means:

• Node type and size are chosen by the customer's cluster administrator, not by Lakehousecat
• Compute, storage, and network costs are billed directly by the customer's cloud provider or on-premises infrastructure
• Scaling decisions (horizontal and vertical) are made by the customer via the Operator configuration
• Lakehousecat provides the Operator and ensures compatibility with standard Kubernetes environments

Infrastructure costs scale with the number of users and the data volume processed. Infrastructure cost optimization (right-sizing, auto-scaling, reserved instances) is the responsibility of the cluster administrator.

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3. Subscription and User Costs

Lakehousecat is available in four tiers, billed monthly or yearly (yearly billing saves 17%):

Tier	Base Fee	Per-User Fee	Max Users	Data Sources
Free	$0/month	—	1	10
Standard	$49/month	$12/user/month	10	50
Premium	$299/month	$12/user/month	100	Unlimited
Enterprise	Custom	$10/user/month	300+	Unlimited

For Enterprise pricing, contact the sales team via the customer portal.

Pricing Example

Standard plan with 10 users:

• Base fee: $49/month
• User seats: 10 × $12 = $120/month
• Total: $169/month

User Seat Billing

Lakehousecat uses a seat-based user model — each invited user who accepts their invitation occupies a seat.

Deactivated users still count

If a user is deactivated or set to Pending status, they continue to occupy a user seat and are counted toward the billing limit. To free a seat, the user must be deleted from the workspace.

Managing user count is therefore a cost-sensitive administrative action. See User Management for details.