Is Manus AI Free? What You Actually Get

Manus AI is not free in the way most people expect. As of August 11, 2026, the official Manus pricing page displays three paid tiers only, $20, $40, and $200 per month, and the "300 refresh credits everyday" line that people quote as the free allowance appears as a feature of those paid plans, not as a standalone free tier.

That matters because Manus is now a Meta property. Meta acquired the Singapore-based company in late December 2025, a deal CNBC reported as the capstone of a year of aggressive AI acquisitions, and the manus.im footer now reads "© 2026 Meta."

Key Takeaways:

• The Manus pricing page currently lists only paid plans: $20/month for 4,000 credits, $40/month for 8,000, and $200/month for 40,000.
• "300 refresh credits everyday" is shown on all three paid tiers. It is not advertised on the pricing page as a free-account entitlement.
• Manus documentation still describes a "Free Plan" with "limited monthly credits," so the company's own two pages disagree. Verify against your account before planning around it.
• Credits are consumed per action, and Manus states consumption "depends on the complexity of the task," so a monthly allowance does not translate to a predictable number of runs.
• If your blocker is credit metering rather than price, a flat-rate hosted agent removes the variable entirely.

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Is Manus AI Free? What the Pricing Page Shows Today

Go to manus.im/pricing right now and you will see a three-card layout with a Monthly and Annually toggle, annual billing marked "Save 17%." The cards are:

Plan label	Price	Monthly credits	Daily refresh	Concurrent tasks
Standard monthly usage	$20 / month	4,000	300 refresh credits everyday	20
Customizable monthly usage	$40 / month	8,000	300 refresh credits everyday	20
Extended usage for productivity	$200 / month	40,000	300 refresh credits everyday	20

All figures above are read directly off the Manus pricing page on August 11, 2026. The $200 tier additionally lists "Free Cloud Computer" and "Professional websites with data analytics." All three list 20 scheduled tasks and early access to beta features.

What is not there is a fourth card labeled Free. There is no $0 column, no "Get started free" plan card, and no stated free credit grant on that page.

This is the single most useful thing to know before you plan a workflow around Manus: the public pricing surface treats the daily credit refresh as something that comes with a subscription.

One update from the same day: rechecking the pricing page later on 11 August 2026, the entry tier had switched to a promotional "$10 first month, then $20/month" with a 50% OFF badge. The standing rate is unchanged at $20, so every credit calculation below still holds, but the number on the card may not match what you see. This is exactly why the figures here carry a date.

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Manus Free Credits: The 300 Daily Refresh, and Who Gets It

The "300 refresh credits everyday" phrase is the one that circulates in every roundup post, usually attached to a free plan. On the live pricing page it sits inside all three paid cards.

Meanwhile the Manus plans documentation still describes a Free Plan as offering "limited monthly credits" and "access to core capabilities," aimed at "individual users exploring Manus AI." It gives no numbers.

So Manus currently publishes two accounts of its own entry tier: a docs page that says a free plan exists without quantifying it, and a pricing page that quantifies everything but shows no free plan. Neither page states a starter credit grant.

We are flagging this rather than resolving it, because resolving it requires an account, and account-level entitlements change without a changelog entry. If you are deciding whether to build on Manus, open the pricing page and your own billing screen on the same day and compare. Do not plan against a number you read in a blog post, including this one, without re-checking the date it was verified.

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Why Manus AI Is Not Giving Free Credits: The Wall People Hit

Search "manus ai free" and Google's People Also Ask box surfaces four questions. One of them is "Why is Manus AI not giving free credits?" The second organic result is Manus's own help center article titled "What should I do if my daily refresh credits have not refreshed?"

When a vendor's own troubleshooting page ranks on page one for a free-tier query, that is the shape of the problem. People are not researching Manus. They are stuck mid-task with an empty balance.

Picture the sequence: you queue a research run in the evening, it consumes the balance, and you wait for the daily refresh to continue tomorrow. The refresh does not land when you expect, and the task you already started is sitting half finished. Nothing is broken in a way you can fix from your side. You are waiting on a meter.

That is a categorically different failure than "this tool is too expensive." Price you can budget for. A credit meter that gates a task you already committed to is a scheduling problem, and it is the reason so many Manus searches carry the word free.

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What a Real Task Costs in Manus AI Credits

Manus does not publish a per-task price list. The plans documentation states that the credits consumed by each interaction "depends on the complexity of the task."

That sentence is the whole difficulty. A credit allowance is only a budget if you can convert it into a number of runs, and complexity-based metering means you cannot do that in advance. The same prompt against a heavier source set costs more.

Work the arithmetic from the other direction instead. On the $20 tier you have 4,000 monthly credits plus a daily refresh. If a deep research run consumes several hundred credits, the monthly allowance covers single-digit heavy runs. If it consumes closer to a thousand, you are looking at a handful. Neither figure is published by Manus, so treat both as scenarios rather than facts, and measure your own first week before committing a workflow to it.

The practical move is to run your three most typical tasks, note the balance before and after each, and divide. That gives you a real cost per task for your work, which no roundup article can give you.

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Manus AI Cost at Actual Usage: The Math Nobody Publishes

The pricing ladder is unusually steep. Going from $20 to $40 doubles credits from 4,000 to 8,000, a clean linear step. Going from $40 to $200 multiplies the price by five and credits by five, 8,000 to 40,000. So the per-credit rate is roughly flat across the ladder, which means there is no volume discount to grow into.

That has a specific consequence. If your usage doubles, your bill doubles. Tools that price per seat or per month flat absorb usage growth. Tools that price per credit do not.

Say a scheduled competitor sweep runs every weekday. Twenty-two runs a month against a 4,000 credit allowance leaves under 200 credits per run before the daily refresh is even counted. Add one ad hoc research request from a colleague and the plan you sized last month no longer fits. You will notice this not as a budget conversation but as a task that will not start.

This is why the honest comparison is not Manus versus a cheaper agent. It is metered versus unmetered.

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What the Meta Acquisition Changes About Manus Pricing

Meta acquired Manus in a deal announced in late December 2025. CNBC's report described Manus as a Singapore-based general AI agent developer, founded in China, and framed the purchase as part of Meta's aggressive AI expansion. VentureBeat's analysis walks through what the deal means for teams that had standardized on Manus for agent work.

For a pricing question, an acquisition matters in one concrete way: entry tiers are the first thing that gets re-examined when a product is folded into a larger company's strategy. A free tier that existed to win developer mindshare has a different justification once distribution comes from a parent company instead.

We are not claiming Meta removed the free plan. The pricing page and the docs page disagree, and we cannot date when that divergence appeared. What we can say is that anyone planning a 2026 workflow on Manus should treat the entry tier as subject to change and should re-verify it, rather than citing a number from a post written before the acquisition closed.

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Free Manus Alternatives That Are Not Credit Metered

If you arrived here because a credit balance stopped a task, the useful category is not "cheaper Manus." It is "agent that does not meter the thing you need to run repeatedly."

Three honest options:

Run an open-source agent yourself. No metering, no bill. You take on the hosting, the uptime, the credential storage, and the scheduling. This is genuinely free if your time is free. For most people evaluating a $20 plan, it is not.

Stay on Manus and size up. If your usage is bursty rather than continuous, the $40 tier plus the daily refresh may simply fit, and switching tools costs more than the difference. Do the per-task measurement described above before you assume otherwise.

Move the recurring work to a flat-rate hosted agent. MoClaw is a hosted cloud AI computer rather than a replacement for the tool you are already using. It runs on a monthly subscription rather than a credit meter, which changes the failure mode: a scheduled task that runs every weekday does not get more expensive the more useful it becomes. It is not free either, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. The difference is that the cost is knowable in advance.

We have written the fuller side-by-side in a cheaper alternative to Manus AI and a wider survey in Manus AI alternatives, including the cases where staying on Manus is the right call.

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FAQ

Is Manus AI free in 2026?

The Manus pricing page as of August 11, 2026 shows three paid plans and no free plan card. The Manus documentation separately describes a Free Plan with unspecified limited credits. Check your own account, since the two official pages disagree.

How many free credits does Manus give per day?

The pricing page lists "300 refresh credits everyday" on all three paid tiers. It does not state a daily refresh figure for accounts without a subscription.

Why is Manus AI not giving free credits?

Manus maintains a help center collection on pricing and plans, including an article about daily refresh credits not refreshing, which suggests timing and eligibility issues are common. If your balance is not refreshing, that support article is the correct first stop, not a settings change on your side.

How much does Manus AI cost per month?

$20 for 4,000 monthly credits, $40 for 8,000, and $200 for 40,000, with annual billing marked as 17% cheaper. All three include 20 concurrent tasks and 20 scheduled tasks.

Does Manus still work the same after the Meta acquisition?

The product remains available at manus.im and the pricing page is live. Meta announced the acquisition in late December 2025. Treat pricing and tier structure as subject to revision and re-verify before committing a workflow.

Is there a genuinely free Manus alternative?

Self-hosting an open-source agent is free of licence cost and shifts the expense to your own infrastructure and time. Hosted options, including MoClaw, are paid, but bill on a flat subscription rather than per credit.

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Choosing Between Manus Credits and a Flat Monthly Agent

The question people type is "is Manus AI free." The question they are actually asking is "will this stop working on me in the middle of the month."

Credit metering answers that badly for recurring work and well for occasional heavy work. If you run deep research a few times a month, the metered model is fine and the $20 tier is genuinely cheap for what it does. If you are scheduling something to run every weekday, every improvement to that automation increases your bill, and you will eventually hit a balance instead of a result.

Measure three of your real tasks against your current balance before you decide anything. That single number, credits per task for your work, settles the question faster than any pricing table, including the one above.

All pricing figures in this article were read directly from manus.im on August 11, 2026. Vendor pricing changes without notice, and Manus is mid-integration into a new parent company, so re-verify before you budget.