Julius AI pricing explained — credits, message limits, and what it actually costs

Julius pricing at a glance (from Julius's own pricing page)

• Free — $0, with an allowance Julius describes three different ways. The billing docs' FAQ says a one-time grant of 100 credits that does not renew; the credits table on that same page says "25 welcome bonus + 25 daily credits"; the pricing page says only "free daily credits" with no amount. None of the three reconciles with the others, so treat the Free allowance as small and read it off your own Usage page. The full quotations are further down.
• Plus — $20/mo, or $16/mo billed yearly. 2,000 credits a month (24,000 a year on annual), 1 seat.
• Pro — $45/mo, or $37/mo billed yearly. 5,000 credits a month (60,000 a year on annual), 1 seat, expanded context window.
• Max — $200/mo, or $166/mo billed yearly. 25,000 credits a month (300,000 a year).
• Ultra — $500/mo, or $416/mo billed yearly. 70,000 credits a month (840,000 a year). Julius's billing docs list this same tier as Max ($500) rather than Ultra, so expect the naming to differ between the docs and the pricing page.
• Business — $450/mo, or $375/mo billed yearly. 60,000 credits a month (720,000 a year) and up to 50 team members. Three larger bands live inside that same card rather than on cards of their own. The page's own card data groups them under the Business card's credit selector and titles them Growth, Growth2 and Growth3 — $750/mo (100,000 credits a month), $1,400/mo (200,000) and $2,500/mo (400,000), all read on 28 August 2026; all three of their buttons read "Get started with Growth". They are published, just not visible until you open that selector — worth knowing if your volume is in that range, and worth knowing that Julius's billing docs call all four of these levels "Business" while the pricing page titles three of them Growth, Growth2 and Growth3.
• Enterprise — custom pricing, listed as unlimited credits with custom connectors, SSO and audit logs.
• Annual billing is presented as a lower effective monthly price rather than a separate plan, and annual credits are granted up front for the whole year rather than monthly.

Credits, not messages: what changed and why it matters

Julius used to meter usage by counting messages. It now measures credits, and its documentation is direct about the reason: different tasks cost different amounts depending on the compute involved, so a simple message costs less than running a full analysis or executing code. Julius frames the switch as what lets it give users access to frontier models and larger context windows without raising prices, and claims the product is up to seven times more capable on complex multi-step tasks under the credit system. Its docs also state that fewer than 5% of users are expected to exceed their monthly credit limits under normal usage.

The practical consequence is that Julius's own answer to how much a message costs is that there is no single answer. Its billing FAQ says cost depends on the message complexity and which tools are invoked — a quick question costs far less than a multi-step analysis that pulls data, runs code and generates a deliverable. The FAQ elsewhere puts it more bluntly: every action in Julius costs credits, and the cost depends on what you are doing, which AI model is used, and how complex the task is. Built-in tools, including the data connectors, draw on the same credit pool.

This is not a criticism — metering by compute rather than by message count is arguably fairer, and it means a cheap question is charged as a cheap question. But it does mean you cannot compute your monthly cost in advance from a price list. You can only measure it after the fact, on Julius's Usage page, which tracks credit consumption in real time.

What burns credits fastest

Julius names three drivers in its documentation, and they are worth reading carefully because they map directly onto how analysts actually work.

• Action type — a plain message costs less than running an analysis or executing code. Since the point of an AI data analyst is to run analysis, most of your real usage sits at the expensive end of this scale rather than the cheap end.
• Model choice — Julius calls model selection one of the biggest drivers of credit consumption, and says its faster in-house and mid-tier models consume credits far more slowly than frontier models. If you leave the model picker on the most capable option, your credits go faster. This is the single biggest lever you control inside Julius.
• Complexity — longer outputs, bigger datasets and multi-step tasks add up faster. A question that requires four steps and a chart is not four times a one-liner; it is whatever the compute cost turns out to be.

The billing rules people get caught by

None of these are hidden — they are all in Julius's published billing and refund policies — but they are the mechanics that determine whether a plan feels fair or frustrating, and they are easy to skip on the way to checkout.

• Credits do not roll over. Unused credits expire at the end of your billing cycle. If your work is seasonal — heavy at month-end, quiet mid-month — you pay for a flat grant against uneven demand.
• You cannot buy more credits. Julius's docs state that purchasing additional credits or topping up your balance is not supported at the moment, and that if you need more usage right away you may consider upgrading your plan. That makes running out a plan-change decision, not a small incremental purchase — the next step above Pro at $45 is Max at $200.
• Credits are non-refundable and non-transferable. They have no cash value, cannot move between accounts, and are forfeited at the end of the current period if you cancel. Credits associated with a reversed payment are revoked.
• Refunds are reviewed case by case, not granted automatically. Julius's refund policy asks you to email its team with your name, purchase email, receipt number and reason, and states explicitly that reviewing your plan, billing interval, pricing and renewal terms before checkout is your responsibility. Approved refunds go back to the original payment method and can take up to ten business days.
• Upgrading resets your billing cycle to the upgrade date, and takes effect immediately. Leftover credits from the previous plan stack with the new plan's credits, but they keep their original expiry — the end of the billing period in which they were granted.
• Downgrading takes effect at the end of the current period, and the unused portion of your current plan is applied as a credit toward your next invoice rather than refunded.
• Switching billing cadence is asymmetric. Monthly to annual takes effect immediately and resets the cycle; annual to monthly takes effect at the end of the annual period unless you email support to expedite it. Julius's billing-cycles page also says to contact its team to switch cadences, which suggests the self-serve path may not always be available.
• Mobile subscriptions cancel elsewhere. If you subscribed through the App Store or Google Play, cancelling on the website does not stop those charges — you have to cancel through Apple or Google.
• Payments run through Stripe, with cards, digital wallets, bank redirects, debits and transfers supported depending on region. Monthly billing is described as every 30 days rather than on a calendar month.

What is gated behind which price

Cost is not only the number on the plan — it is the number on the plan that includes the thing you need. Julius's own plan-comparison table draws these lines, and a few of them will decide your tier for you before credit volume ever enters the conversation.

Database connectors are the big one. On Free, the listed connectors are Google Drive, OneDrive and SharePoint — file sources. Snowflake, BigQuery and Postgres appear from Plus upward, so the cheapest Julius plan that connects a real database is Plus at $20/mo ($16/mo annual). Julius's connector docs cover a wider set including MySQL, SQL Server, Databricks, Supabase and Vertica, plus Google Ads and Meta Ads. Export formats — slides, HTML artifacts, charts and images — are also listed from Plus upward rather than on Free. The sandbox memory ladder that used to sit on this page — 2 GB of RAM on Free, 32 GB on paid plans, 64 GB on Enterprise, read 29 July 2026 — is no longer published anywhere on the pricing page: on 20 August 2026, and again on 28 August 2026, the words sandbox, GB, RAM, Python and notebook return zero matches across the whole page. For notebooks that is now confirmed at the source rather than inferred from an absence: julius.ai/docs/notebooks-sunset says, word for word, "Notebooks have been sunset" (read 28 August 2026). If sandbox size decides your purchase, ask Julius directly rather than trusting any figure — including ours — that predates that change.

Two features are listed only from Business ($450/mo) upward: the Julius Slack agent, and Semantic Schema Learning. Scheduled runs are capped at 3 on Pro and unlimited from Business. Everything team-shaped — shared workspace, shared files and threads, sub-teams, roles and permissions, a usage dashboard, centralised billing and SOC 2 Type II compliance — also starts at Business. Single sign-on and audit logs are Enterprise only.

So the honest read of the ladder is that Plus and Pro are individual plans, and the moment you need more than one person in the same workspace, the price step is from $45 to $450. That is not unusual for this category, but it is a large step and it is better to know before you build a workflow on Pro.

One more thing about that ladder that is easy to misread: it is not monotonic. Business at $450/mo carries 60,000 credits a month, while Ultra at $500/mo carries 70,000. Business is not the tier above Ultra — it is the team tier, priced for shared seats and compliance rather than for volume. If you are buying capacity rather than seats, paying more can get you fewer credits.

Where Julius's own pages disagree with each other

None of this is a gotcha. Pricing pages get edited by different people on different days, and a stale line is just a stale line. What makes the ones below worth your attention is narrower: each lands on exactly a number or a feature you would need in order to forecast a bill or pick a tier — what a tier includes, whether you can buy more when you run out, how many credits a year contains, and whether something you are being sold still exists. In each case the same question, asked of Julius's own published material, comes back with two different answers — sometimes from two pages, and three of the five times from two places on one page, which is the harder version to catch. The fair conclusion is not that somebody is being dishonest. It is that you cannot compute your monthly cost from this table, and neither can they. Every quotation below was re-read at its source on 28 August 2026, and none of them had been reconciled on that date.

• The $450 tier is sold on a capability the $20 tier already lists. The Business card on julius.ai/pricing (read 14 August 2026 and again on 28 August 2026) names, word for word, "Postgres, BigQuery, Snowflake + more data connectors" as a reason to be on Business. The tier-comparison table on that same page fills the Data connectors row for Plus ($20/mo) with, word for word: "Google Drive, OneDrive, Sharepoint, Snowflake, Bigquery, Postgres". What it means for you: this one cuts against us and we will say it anyway — if connecting to Postgres is what you came for, you do not need the $450 tier to get it, and "it connects to my database" is not a reason to choose Intellrise over Julius Plus. Read the comparison table rather than the card, and Plus covers it. What Plus does not cover is the step immediately after connecting. On that same Julius comparison table, Semantic Schema Learning — the thing that remembers that your gmv is ex-VAT and that status 3 means refunded — is marked unavailable on Free, Plus and Pro, and available from Business at $450/mo. So on Plus you connect to Postgres and then re-explain your own columns, session after session; on Intellrise that layer is on Pro at $29/mo. If you are already paying for Plus, that gap, not the connector, is the thing worth fourteen days of your attention.
• One document says you cannot buy credits, and also that your purchase is non-refundable. In julius.ai/docs/billing/credits-overview (read 14 August 2026 and again on 28 August 2026), the answer to "Can I buy more credits?" is, word for word: "At the moment, purchasing additional credits or topping up your balance is not supported." The same document's answer to "What is the credit refund policy?" reads, word for word: "Credits are non-refundable, whether you bought them as a top-up or received them through your subscription." What it means for you: a refund policy governing a kind of purchase the same document says you cannot make. The dull explanation is the likely one — policies get written to cover more than a product currently ships — and we are not going to dress it up as confusion. What it does mean is that the page cannot settle the question for you, and that is the question you need answered on the afternoon you run dry mid-analysis, not the morning you sign up.
• Pro's annual allowance disagrees with itself by 10,000 credits. The Pro card on julius.ai/pricing (read 14 August 2026 and again on 28 August 2026), switched to annual billing, reads "60,000 credits per year", which is consistent with the monthly view's "5,000 credits monthly" at twelve months. The FAQ in julius.ai/docs/billing/credits-overview says, word for word: "For example, a Pro annual subscriber gets all 50,000 credits for the year on day one." That document's own table also lists Pro at 5,000 a month — so the document contradicts the table printed inside it. What it means for you: before committing to twelve months, get the 10,000-credit difference confirmed in writing by a human at Julius rather than planning a year of work against a figure two Julius pages cannot agree on.
• The Free allowance has three published descriptions, not one. The credits table lists Free as "25 welcome bonus + 25 daily credits"; the prose under it says "The Free plan's 25 welcome bonus credits are a one-time grant and don't renew"; and the FAQ on the same page says "Free plan users receive a one-time grant of 100 credits when they sign up; these credits don't renew." So the one-time grant is either 25 or 100, and daily credits either exist or do not, depending on which line you read. All three quotations in this bullet were read on 14 August 2026, re-read on 28 August 2026, and were unreconciled on both days.
• Julius's pricing page is still selling a feature its own docs say is gone. The FAQ on julius.ai/pricing, under "Can I give Julius my business context?", answers word for word: "Yes, upload your data dictionary, train Custom Agents on your company schemas and tables, or include your DBT connection information." julius.ai/docs/custom-agents-sunset says, word for word: "Custom Agents have been sunset". Both read 28 August 2026. What it means for you: we cannot tell you whether that is a marketing page lagging a product decision or something else, and we are not going to guess — but if training an agent on your schema is part of why you are buying, that is the sentence to get confirmed before you pay rather than after. The same pattern caught us: julius.ai/docs/notebooks-sunset says "Notebooks have been sunset" (read 28 August 2026), and until we re-read it that morning our own free-plan guide was still recommending Julius on the strength of Notebooks. We corrected ours the same day; theirs was still live when we re-read it on 28 August 2026.

What a flat plan actually costs you when you are wrong

The question you ask first is almost never the question you needed. You ask for revenue by month, see the grain is wrong, ask again by order date instead of ship date, notice the join has doubled every row with two shipments, fix that, and somewhere around the seventh attempt you finally have something you would put in front of another person. That is not sloppiness — that is what analysis is: mostly rework, and most of the rework lands early, when the data is least familiar and the questions are worth the most.

A credit balance bills all seven of those attempts, not just the one you keep. To be fair to Julius, it does not bill them equally — metering by compute means the six cheap wrong turns are charged as cheap, which is the fairer design. The problem is not the rate, it is that you cannot see the meter before you spend it: the week you understand the data least is the week you ask the most questions, and it is also the week you can least predict what they will cost. On Intellrise there is no balance to watch and no counter in the corner of the screen, because Intellrise does not resell model capacity and so has nothing to count. Being wrong eight times in a row is a fact about the data, not a budgeting decision you have to justify.

If you want those same four questions answered about Intellrise, here they are in one place — a page that catalogues someone else's inconsistencies should be able to survive the same audit. What a tier includes: Intellrise Pro is $29/mo, or $24/mo billed annually, and the semantic layer, every export format and every source type sit inside it. Whether you can buy more when you run out: there is nothing to buy, because Intellrise sells no credits at all — you attach your own AI provider key and that provider bills you directly at its list price. How many credits a year contains: none, on either cadence. Whether what you just read still exists: the date at the top of this page is ours, every quotation on it carries the day we read it, and where a row has left the source page we say it left rather than keeping the number alive. Julius's pricing page carries no date of its own at all — last updated, as of and effective date all return zero matches (28 August 2026). You can check the first three of those for yourself in fourteen days of Intellrise Pro, no card required.

The structural difference: a meter prices your curiosity

Here is the part that matters more than any single number. Real analysis is iterative. You ask a question, look at the answer, notice the number is wrong because a filter was off, ask again, split it by region, realise the region field has three spellings, fix that, re-run, then ask for it as a chart. That loop is the work — not overhead on the work.

Under a compute-metered model, every turn of that loop has a price, and so does every retry that produced nothing useful. The cost of being thorough and the cost of being wrong are the same cost. That does not make metering unfair; it makes it a tax on exploration. We have not measured how people actually behave under a meter, so take what follows as the direction the incentive points rather than as a finding of ours: batching questions instead of asking them as they occur, leaving a cheaper model selected on work that needed the better one, not going back to check the surprising number. If none of that would ever describe you, this section is not your problem. If some of it would, the thing to notice is the exchange rate — the money saved is small, and the analysis is worse.

A flat plan plus your own provider key changes the shape of the bill rather than only its size. The subscription is fixed, and the variable part is raw token cost paid directly to your AI provider with no per-message markup in between. Exploration still is not free — tokens are tokens, and a retry costs what a retry costs — but it is charged at provider cost, and you can put a cheap model on routine questions and a strong one on the hard ones without a plan change in the middle.

How Intellrise prices the same job

• Free — $0. One database source plus Google Sheets (uncounted), 3 dashboards with unlimited charts, unlimited reports and every export format (CSV, Excel, PDF, PPTX, Word), AI report editing, AI custom instructions, and editing dbt schema and field descriptions. You bring your own AI key.
• Pro — $29/mo, or about $24/mo billed annually. Unlimited data sources — the count never enters the price — plus file upload, unlimited dashboards with full customisation (drag and resize, chart type and colour, edit the SQL), AI Semantic Schema Learning, per-key AI configuration, read-only share links, and one-off email delivery of a report or dashboard.
• Every new account starts on a 14-day Pro trial with no card. After it lapses, the free tier stays free — it is the landing state, not an expiring demo.
• All plans are bring-your-own-key. Intellrise does not resell model capacity, so there is no credit meter, no message cap and no per-question markup. You pay your provider — Gemini, OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepSeek, MiniMax or any OpenAI-compatible endpoint — directly for tokens, at their list price.
• A team workspace with shared sources and seats is not shipped yet, so today Intellrise is priced and built for individuals and small groups working on their own sources. If you need a shared multi-seat workspace right now, that is a real reason to look elsewhere.
• If, on the other hand, you are the one person who writes the queries — and "sharing" in your week means sending a chart rather than handing over a seat — that gap never touches your work. What does touch it is the bill, and the bill is the part you can settle for yourself in a fortnight, on your own database, without a card.

The arithmetic, done honestly

The two models are not directly comparable question-for-question, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. Julius does not publish a credit cost per action, so there is no way to turn 5,000 credits into a number of questions from the outside. What we can do is show what the bring-your-own-key side costs, so you can put your own numbers on both.

Take a schema-aware question against a connected database: the request carries a system prompt, your schema and semantic-layer context, and the conversation so far. Call it roughly 12,000 input tokens and 800 output tokens for a typical turn — more for a long multi-step analysis, less for a follow-up. At a cheap flash-tier model published at $0.30 per million input tokens and $2.50 per million output, that is 12,000 x $0.30/1M = $0.0036 in, plus 800 x $2.50/1M = $0.0020 out. About half a cent a question.

Run 500 questions in a month and the token bill is about $2.80. On Intellrise Pro that is $29 + $2.80, roughly $32/mo, or about $27/mo on annual billing. Push the same 500 questions through a frontier model published at $5 per million in and $25 per million out and the token bill becomes about $0.08 a question, so $40 — roughly $69/mo all in. A mid-tier model at $3 in and $15 out lands near $53/mo; a small model at $1 and $5 near $37/mo. Those are published list rates at the time of writing and they move, so substitute your provider's current numbers, but the shape holds: model choice moves your bill by a factor of ten, and you own that choice. One line is missing from every total above and it is ours to disclose: the $29 is a pre-tax price, so if sales tax or VAT applies where you live it is added on top at checkout — we have no rate to quote you because Lemon Squeezy publishes none.

Now scale up. Go to 2,000 questions a month on the cheap model and the token bill is about $11 — $40/mo all in, because the variable part is linear. That is the whole argument for the flat-plus-BYOK shape: the curve is a straight line you can steer, not a staircase. On a credit model, the answer to exhausting your grant is a tier change, because top-ups are not supported — and above Pro at $45 the next rung is $200.

There is one more arithmetic we had never written down, and a reader had to ask for it: if you are an independent consultant carrying three clients, is that one Pro account or three? It is one. Pro sets no cap on the number of data sources, so three separate Postgres databases, on three different hosts, belonging to three different clients, sit on the same $29 and the same token bill above — the count does not enter the price anywhere. Our Terms put the condition where it belongs rather than on the plan: you are responsible for having the right to connect and query the data sources you add.

Two limits before you plan around that. Everything you connect lives in one workspace, so each question's schema context lists the tables and columns of all three and a single query can join across them — deliberate, because cross-source questions are half the point, but it does mean there is no wall between one client and the next inside one account, and a client who requires strict separation needs an account of their own. And we do not publish a data processing agreement today, so if a client's compliance review asks for one, ask us before you connect them.

What that means for you, priced rather than left for you to work out — because we just sent you down that road and it would be cheap of us to stop here. A second account is another $29/mo; there is no multi-account or agency bundle in our plans today, so two isolated clients are $58/mo and three are $87/mo, each with its own login and its own AI key. So the honest version of the earlier number is conditional, and the condition is not yours to decide: if your clients' data sits in databases they own, and you are the only person asking the questions, and none of them requires separation on paper, it is $29 plus your own token bill, once. If one of the three does require it, it is $58 plus tokens. Work out which of your clients would ask before you decide whether this is cheaper than what you pay now — and if that arithmetic is what decides it, write to us first rather than paying twice to find out.

What "never re-explain your columns" means in practice

Watch what actually happens when someone points a general chat tool at a real warehouse. They paste the schema of a 40-table Postgres, and then they type the footnotes: gmv is ex-VAT; status = 3 means refunded, not cancelled; orders_v2 is the table everyone uses and orders is a 2023 archive nobody dared drop; the finance week starts on a Monday. None of that is the question you came to ask, and all of it has to be typed before you can ask it. Next morning, new session, blank slate, footnotes gone. Whatever the per-question price is, that retyping is the tax you are actually paying.

Intellrise treats those footnotes as part of the database rather than part of the chat. On connection it annotates the schema table by table and column by column, and when you correct it in conversation — no, gmv excludes VAT — the correction is written into the semantic layer instead of into a transcript that expires. It persists across later sessions. You can open that layer and edit any definition by hand, and if you already maintain descriptions in dbt, Intellrise works from that shape rather than asking you to keep a second copy of your own vocabulary somewhere else. On Julius's own comparison table this capability, Semantic Schema Learning, is marked available on Business and Enterprise and unavailable on Free, Plus and Pro; on Intellrise it is on Pro at $29/mo.

Now the limit of what we can claim, because it matters more than the claim. Our evidence for this is our own code path — we can show where the annotations are generated, stored and re-injected. We have not published a benchmark against somebody else's 40-table Postgres full of inconsistent naming, so do not take an accuracy claim from us on faith; we have not earned one yet. That is what the fourteen days are for, and there is a specific way to spend them: connect the messiest database you own rather than a clean sample, teach it your three worst column names on day one, then come back on day three and ask a question that depends on all three. If you have to explain any of them a second time, you have your answer, and finding out cost you no card details.

The setup step we cannot wave away

Julius is faster to start than Intellrise, and it is worth saying so plainly. You sign up, type a question, get an answer, and the credits come out of a balance somebody has already funded on your behalf. Intellrise makes you do a chore first: create an API key on your own provider account and paste it into Settings before your first question will run. If your honest reaction is that you would rather not be the person who owns an API key, that is a reasonable reaction, and Julius is the smoother path for you.

Here is what the chore buys. The key is yours, on your account, at the provider's list price, with no reseller margin — Intellrise never becomes the shop you buy tokens from. Your model spend is itemised by the provider in tokens rather than summarised by us in a unit we invented. Because the key is on your provider account, you can revoke it there at any time independently of your subscription, and you can remove or swap it inside Intellrise from Settings then AI Keys, where keys are stored encrypted at rest with AES-256-GCM and only ever shown back to you masked. Gemini, OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepSeek, MiniMax and any OpenAI-compatible endpoint are supported, so the choice of provider stays yours too.

What we do to shorten it: it happens once per account rather than once per project, so connecting a second database or building a new dashboard never sends you back to the provider console, and we publish the five steps for the free Google Gemini key at intellrise.com/help/free-ai-key/ rather than leaving you to find them. The honest scorecard is still two bills instead of one, and one setup step instead of none. If that is a bad trade for the way you work, do not buy Intellrise.

Where Julius is cheaper — and it often is

A comparison that never concedes anything is not worth reading, so here is the concession, and it is not small.

At low volume, Julius is cheaper. Julius Plus at $16-$20/mo connects Postgres, BigQuery or Snowflake and includes 2,000 credits. Intellrise Pro is $24-$29/mo before you have spent a single token. If your usage sits comfortably inside a Plus grant, Julius costs less every month, and no amount of arithmetic about marginal token cost changes that. Even Julius Pro at $37-$45/mo is in the same neighbourhood as Intellrise Pro plus a frontier-model token bill.

If your work is spreadsheet and file analysis rather than database analysis, Julius Free is $0 and does that job with Drive, OneDrive and SharePoint connectors. If you want a shared team workspace with roles, centralised billing and SOC 2 Type II today, Julius Business at $375-$450/mo has one and Intellrise does not. If you need unlimited scheduled runs, Julius has them from Business; Intellrise has one-off email delivery on Pro and no scheduling at all. And Julius offers special pricing for qualifying startups on request, plus institutional codes for education and workplace programmes.

The one place the flat-plus-BYOK model reliably wins on money is heavy or spiky usage, because the variable cost is linear and you choose the model. The place it wins regardless of volume is predictability: the bill does not move when you have a week where you need to ask forty follow-up questions. And there is a genuine cost on our side of the ledger too — bring-your-own-key means a setup step. You have to create a provider key before anything runs. For someone who wants to paste a spreadsheet and get a chart in ninety seconds, that is a real disadvantage, not a footnote.

How to actually decide, in about twenty minutes

• Write down your monthly question volume honestly, including retries and dead ends. We have no survey telling you by how much people undercount it, so we will not quote one — only the observation that retries and abandoned questions are the easiest part to leave out, and that this figure is the input both pricing models are most sensitive to.
• Decide whether you need a database connector or only files. If files are enough, the cheapest credible option is a free tier, and that is where you should start.
• If you are already on Julius, open the Usage page and look at what a representative question of yours actually consumed. That single measurement tells you more than any pricing page, and it is the only way to convert credits into your own work.
• Count seats. If more than one person needs the same workspace today, that decides your tier — and in Julius's ladder it is a step from $45 to $450.
• Price the bring-your-own-key side with your provider's current published rates and your own volume, not with the numbers in this article. Add the flat plan. Compare that total to the Julius plan whose grant your measured usage fits inside.
• Test the part that is supposed to compound. On Intellrise that is the semantic layer, so correct one badly named column on day one and check on day three whether the correction survived — a tool that forgets your vocabulary is charging you to retype it, whatever the meter says. Intellrise puts that layer on Pro at $29/mo; on Julius's comparison table it is a Business feature at $450/mo.
• Then test both on one real question from your own data, because a cost model you cannot get a correct answer out of is not cheap at any price.

Try it before you pay for anything

There is a public demo at https://intellrise.com/demo/ that needs no signup and no card — a synthetic sample dataset, the exact SQL each chart runs, and the exact numbers it returns, so you can judge the substance rather than a feature list. The page says plainly that those queries were hand-written for it rather than generated by the product, so treat it as a worked example of the output, not of the text-to-SQL step. If it looks right, every new account starts on a 14-day Pro trial with no card, and after that the free tier keeps working: one database source plus Google Sheets, three dashboards, and unlimited reports and exports on your own AI key.

The two things Intellrise is built around are worth stating plainly, because they are what the flat price buys. First, it is end-to-end: one plain-English question goes to a readable query plan, then a chart, then a dashboard, then an exportable report, in one place. Second, it keeps a semantic layer you correct once — the AI annotates your schema, learns what your columns and tables mean from your conversations, and stores those definitions against the source, with a dbt mode and a manual editor — they survive later sessions and a schema refresh, and the one thing that clears them is re-running a Google Sheet source's tab picker. The automatic first pass is worth reading rather than trusting; after that you do not re-explain your data, and you do not pay a higher tier to stop re-explaining it.