Accounts & billing

Brainstorm works with no account at all — bring your own model key and everything runs locally. An account adds two things on top: hosted models you pay for from a balance (no key wrangling), and synced, collaborative boards.

Everything lives under the hamburger menu (top-left), which has three tabs: Boards, Account, and Usage.

Creating an account

In the Account tab, sign up with email and password or Google. Email sign-ups get a verification link; verifying your address unlocks paid actions and adds a $1 welcome credit to get you started.

You can keep using Brainstorm signed out — you just won’t have hosted models, cloud sync, or collaboration.

Two ways to use a model: BYOK or hosted

The choice is per feature — you can bring your own key for chat while paying for hosted image generation, or any mix. In the Account tab, each track (Chat and Image generation) offers:

• My own key (BYOK) — point it at any OpenAI-compatible endpoint with your own API key. This is free — requests run from your browser and never touch our balance. See Chat & LLM for the fields.
• Hosted — pick a model from a curated list and we call the provider for you. Each request is metered against your dollar balance at the model’s listed price. No keys to manage.

Balance and top-ups

Your balance is a single dollar amount that funds all hosted usage (chat and image generation draw from the same pool). A balance pill shows the current total.

Top up any amount (from $1) via Stripe Checkout from the Account tab. Top-up balance never expires.

Plus subscription

Plus is $15/month and adds:

• $15 of usage credit every month — your balance is refilled to $15 of subscription credit each billing cycle (it’s a cap, not a running total: unused credit doesn’t roll over). Hosted usage spends this subscription credit first, then any top-up balance.
• Collaboration — invite people to share and edit boards together. See Collaboration.

Subscribe (and later Manage subscription — update your card, view invoices, or cancel) from the Account tab; both open Stripe’s hosted pages. There’s no free trial, and it’s a single flat plan.

Cross-device sync of your own boards is free for any signed-in user — it’s not a Plus feature. Plus is specifically about collaborating on shared boards.

If a subscription lapses, your local boards keep working and cloud boards stay readable and downloadable for a retention window; sync just stops pushing new changes until you resubscribe.

Usage

The Usage tab lists your metered hosted requests — per model, with token counts and what each one cost — so you can see where the balance goes. BYOK requests don’t appear here (they never touch our servers).