Why Pro and Pro AI are separate tiers.

The first thing to know about Bonfiyah's pricing: we resisted the impulse to bundle.

The conventional move would be a single Pro tier at $24.99/mo that bundled everything Pro AI does today. It would have higher conversion, higher ARPU, and a simpler pricing page. It would also be wrong, because it would charge $24.99/mo to roughly 70% of users who don't need the AI inference cost burned on their behalf.

Two genuinely different problems.

The recording-volume problem is what most active recorders run into around month three. You have 60+ recordings. The Free tier's 120-minute-per-month cap is now a real constraint. You want sync between iPhone, iPad, and Mac. Persistent speakers across recordings would be useful. Search across the library is useful. Auto-summary on every recording is useful. The multi-device sync. All Pro features. All built on architecture that runs once at recording time, with no per-use AI inference cost.

One thing that isn't a Pro feature: the widgets and the live recording Dynamic Island. Those are free for everyone, in every tier — Flag / Quiet / Stop and a capture meter without unlocking, plus eight widgets in all — four on the Home Screen and Lock Screen, three live activities, and a Control Center starter. The Pro AI data some widgets show (Daily Brief, Promise Ledger, Contradictions) needs a subscription to populate, but the widgets themselves never do.

The stakes-attached AI problem is different. You have a meeting that matters and you want a 250-word executive briefing across the project's last six recordings. You have a witness deposition and you want commitments tracked with timestamps. You have a compatibility analysis you only want to run once on this conversation, with the consent gate, with the four research frameworks. These are inference-heavy operations that cost real money to run, and they only make sense for users who are routinely doing high-stakes work.

The math.

An AI Summary on a 60-minute recording uses roughly 25,000 input tokens through the inference layer. At Bonfiyah's negotiated rates, that's about $0.04 of variable cost per generated summary. Project Context, Compatibility, Team Dynamics, and the deep Speaker Insights pass each cost between $0.06 and $0.18 of inference. A heavy Pro AI user runs 50–80 inference operations a month — call it $5–10 of variable cost. Add infrastructure (Apple's 30%/15% cut, the upstream transcription provider line, iCloud transfer, multi-device sync infrastructure, observability) and Pro AI's standard rate of $34.99/mo lands at sustainable margin once intro pricing rolls off.

Pro at $24.99/mo standard ($14.99 intro for the first 2 months) has essentially no per-user inference cost. It covers the App Store cut, the iCloud transfer cost, the the upstream transcription provider transcription line, the multi-device sync infrastructure, and a stable recurring contribution to the engineering work. It runs profitably at low usage volumes; it runs more profitably at high ones.

If we'd bundled at $24.99/mo flat, we'd be charging Pro users for inference they're not running. The most committed-but-not-AI-heavy customers — the litigators recording witness sessions, the journalists building source archives — would be paying for inference they don't use. The pricing would feel wrong, and over time, it would cause churn.

Why intro pricing instead of a flat rate.

The standard rate has to be high enough to absorb the long-run inference and infrastructure costs profitably. The intro rate has to be low enough that someone unfamiliar with the category will give it a fair test. We split the difference: Pro at $14.99/mo for 2 months, then $24.99/mo; Pro AI at $24.99/mo for 60 days, then $34.99/mo. The 60 days on Pro AI is a deliberate choice — the cross-recording surfaces compound, so a short look isn't enough to judge the product. Two months of cheap access to the full Pro AI suite is enough time to know whether it's earning its place in your work.

Annual plans get an intro-priced first year and step up at renewal. The full intro-pricing explainer →

The clean upgrade trigger.

Most users hit Pro before they hit Pro AI. The trigger for Pro is concrete: you record more than a couple of hours a month, or you want sync across iPhone/iPad/Mac, or you want speakers and search to work across recordings. Once any one of those is true, $14.99/mo intro and $24.99/mo standard is correctly priced.

The trigger for Pro AI is different. It's not "I'd like more AI features." It's "I have a specific class of work where being right about a meeting matters more than $40 a month." Witness preparation. Investor commitments. Per-client diagnostic reads. Cross-project executive briefings. The work where the result of getting it wrong is worse than the cost of running the inference.

Most Bonfiyah customers stay on Pro indefinitely and that is correct. About 20% add Pro AI; some keep it; many cycle in for stakes-attached projects and back out for the quiet months. We charge by the month so this is frictionless. And the Free tier — 120 minutes of recording a month — is the no-commitment way to try Bonfiyah before you ever pay; the paid tiers then lead with intro pricing so the first stretch is cheap.

What this means for you.

If you record meetings regularly and want them to be searchable, summarised, and synced across devices: Pro. $14.99/mo for the first 2 months, then $24.99/mo. Or $149.99 first year, $199.99 thereafter. The vast majority of active recorders correctly land here.

If your work has a layer where AI getting it right materially matters — high-value meetings, legal proceedings, per-client diagnostic work, decision-making across projects — Pro AI. $24.99/mo for the first 60 days, then $34.99/mo. Or $179.99 first year, $279.99 thereafter. The 60-day intro window is real; you'll have at least two months of cheap access to know whether the AI features carry their cost on your specific work.

The Free tier is the full app for up to 120 minutes a month on a single device, indefinitely. We resisted gimping it on features beyond what scales with infrastructure cost. If you're a casual recorder with a few meetings a month and one device, you should never need to upgrade — and we'd rather have you happy on Free than annoyed on Pro.

One fair-use line on cloud transcription.

Recording on Pro and Pro AI is uncapped — record as long as you like. The one line worth stating plainly: cloud AI transcription with speaker separation is included for up to 10 hours of audio per 24-hour period, per account. If you somehow blow past 10 hours of recorded audio in a single day, recording and transcription keep working on-device (Apple Speech) so you're never blocked — full cloud transcription resumes at the start of the next 24-hour period. This is the same Silent Fallback behaviour that kicks in when the upstream provider has a bad moment: the capture never stops, the cloud speaker-diarization pass just waits for the allowance to reset. The cap exists so a few extreme-volume accounts can't degrade transcription for everyone else; in normal personal and small-team use you'll never reach it.

Pro AI ships twenty cross-recording surfaces — Proactive Notifications, AI Project Context, Compatibility Analysis, Team Dynamics, MBTI Compatibility (Keirsey-Bates pair scoring derived from Big Five via Costa & McCrae 1992), Ray Dalio Pointillist Painting (10-dimension team heatmap + 16 PrinciplesYou archetypes), Mach-IV (Machiavellianism inline card per Christie & Geis 1970, conservatively scored), Daily Brief (one morning roll-up, capped at 1 critical ping/day, optional email-with-deep-links — v3.0.447), Weekly Report (your whole week in one summary — meetings, promises kept/broken, people, decisions, topics), Bonfire Pulse (weekly self-portrait through the 10 Principles of Burning Man, Larry Harvey 2004 — unaffiliated, fair-use; v3.1.0), Founder Insights (weekly six-dimension mirror on operator posture — Vision Clarity, Conviction, Customer Obsession, Capital Discipline, Hiring Posture, Operating Cadence; v3.0.764), Speaker Memory Health (a voice memory that learns over time and self-heals — Strong / Still learning / Needs attention, voice-samples learned, mixed-voiceprint and confusable-with-someone flags; computed from voice biometrics only), Promise Tracker, Contradictions, Pre-Brief, People Memory, Story Mode, Speaker Themes, Project Actions, and the new in-app Help AI (conversational assistant on every screen — your-data-grounded answers with citations, structured tool proposals before any action runs; v3.0.900). These surfaces use templated, deterministic outputs where stability matters, and AI inference where insight matters.

And finally: Bonfiyah Friends. Once you're on Pro or Pro AI, every paid signup you refer earns both sides a free month. No cap →

See the full pricing breakdown with every feature on every tier, or read the intro-pricing explainer.