Pricing Overview
The OpenAlex data is free — but serving it is not, so usage is what costs money. Pricing is simple and transparent: every account gets $1 of API usage per day for free, and if you need more than that, there are exactly two ways to get it — pay as you go, or an annual plan. One of those three covers everyone, and the vast majority of users never leave the free tier. (Current prices always live on the pricing page; this section explains what you’re buying.)
Free: $1 per day
Create a free OpenAlex account and you get an API key with $1 of usage per day — no payment method required. That’s enough for most research and personal projects. The budget resets every midnight UTC; how usage maps to API calls is covered in the API docs.
Pay as you go: prepaid usage
If you need more than $1 on a given day, add prepaid usage in $1 increments, self-serve, on the pricing page. Prepaid usage is only drawn down after your free daily budget runs out, and it expires 3 months after your most recent purchase. See Buying & renewing for the mechanics (including VAT invoices).
Annual plans
For organizations and heavy users, three annual plans bundle a much larger daily API budget with priority support and other benefits — while directly supporting OpenAlex as open infrastructure. Each plan includes everything in the one before it. Full benefit details and activation instructions live on each plan’s page.
Member — $5,000/year
The entry plan for organizations that rely on OpenAlex. You get a $20/day API budget ($7,300/year of usage — a 32% saving over pay-as-you-go), the admin dashboard for managing your organization’s users and billing, and community representation: advisory-board nominations and a seat at our quarterly supporter meetings. Academic and government institutions also get the affiliation editor and free Unsub access. Full details →
Member+ — $10,000/year
Everything in Member, plus a $100/day API budget ($36,500/year of usage — a 73% saving), basic support (help with critical API bugs), and daily sync: a complete daily snapshot of the database plus API filters that return everything new or changed since any date. Full details →
Partner — from $20,000/year
Everything in Member+, plus a $200+/day API budget sized to your needs, full ticket-based support for all issues, and — for academic and government institutions — 3 power-user accounts with extra-high API limits and 5 hours of consulting per year. Partner pricing starts at $20,000 and scales with your use case. Full details →
Ready to talk? Email sales@openalex.org. If you’re coming from an older Premium or Institutional contract, see Legacy plans.
The PDF sync add-on
OpenAlex caches more than 50 million open-access full-text PDFs (plus machine-readable TEI XML). Any annual plan can add the PDF sync service: persistent read access to the content archive’s S3-compatible bucket, so you can sync the complete archive to your own storage — and keep receiving new PDFs as they arrive, continuously.
Note what’s for sale here: sync, not PDFs. In keeping with our free data, paid services model, we don’t sell the documents — we sell the service of delivering the living, continuously-updated archive to your infrastructure. The add-on requires an active annual plan (any tier) and is priced separately; contact sales for a quote. For the technical side — bucket layout, manifests, and smaller-scale download options — see Fulltext.
Free data, paid services
Scholarly metadata is treated in most markets as “the new oil” — value is captured by limiting access. OpenAlex takes the opposite position: the data is a public good, released under a CC0 public-domain license with no “personal use only” carve-out and no permission to ask. Revenue comes from time and services layered on top — serving, freshness, support — rather than from the data itself, mirroring the POSI principle of revenue based on services, not data.
This is also structural insurance: OpenAlex is a US 501(c)(3) nonprofit, all code is open source, and the full dataset is openly downloadable — so if we ever lost our way, anyone could take the data and code and continue the mission. Co-founder and CEO Jason Priem walks through the model, and the most common questions about it, in this video.