What is included in the free tier?

MatCraft's free tier is designed to let individual researchers and small teams evaluate the platform without any commitment. It includes everything you need to run meaningful optimization campaigns.

Free Tier Includes

| Feature | Limit | |————-|———-| | Active campaigns | 3 concurrent | | Evaluations per month | 1,000 | | Materials | 10 | | Data points per material | 500 | | Surrogate model size | Up to 2 hidden layers, 128 neurons each | | Domain plugins | All 16 built-in domains | | Team members | 1 (individual only) | | API access | Full REST API | | CLI access | Full CLI | | Data export | CSV and JSON | | Dashboard | Full access | | Data retention | 12 months of inactivity |

What Counts as an Evaluation?

An "evaluation" is a single call to the surrogate model, physics model, or manual evaluation entry. In a typical campaign:

• Training the surrogate model does not count as evaluations.
• Each candidate composition scored by the optimizer counts as one evaluation.
• A campaign with 15 iterations and batch size 5 uses approximately 75 evaluations (plus internal optimizer evaluations, which are counted separately).

For most research projects, 1,000 evaluations per month is sufficient to run 5-10 campaigns.

Upgrading

When you approach your limits, the dashboard shows a usage indicator. You can upgrade to Pro at any time from Settings > Billing. Your existing data, campaigns, and results carry over seamlessly.

Self-Hosted

If you self-host the open-source core, there are no limits on campaigns, evaluations, or team size. The free tier limits only apply to the managed cloud service at matcraft.ai.

Academic Users

Students and faculty at accredited institutions can apply for a free Academic tier that includes Pro-level limits. See the "Academic Discount" FAQ for details.