[Pitfalls] Bolt's free tier caps you at 300,000 tokens a day, resets on the 1st with no rollover, and hides its best discounts in the cancel flow

Bolt is a chat-to-website builder. You describe an app in plain English and it writes the full front end and back end for you. It is aimed at non-engineers who want a working prototype fast. The free tier looks generous on the pricing card. The traps live in the fine print, in the reset rules, and in a set of discount codes you only see when you try to leave. Here is what we verified on bolt.new/pricing and support.bolt.new, and how to avoid each catch.

Trap 1: the daily cap, not the monthly cap, is what stops you

Bolt bills in tokens. A token is a small chunk of text, roughly a word fragment, that the AI reads or writes. Every prompt you send and every file Bolt generates burns tokens.

The free plan has two ceilings. Bolt’s pricing card and its FAQ both state it: a 300,000 token daily limit and a 1,000,000 token monthly limit. Most people read the monthly number and assume they have a month of runway. They do not. The daily cap is the one you hit.

A single large project, with many files and a few rounds of “fix this bug”, can eat 300,000 tokens in one sitting. Once that happens, you wait until tomorrow. And Bolt does not publish what actually happens the moment you run out. The site only says upgrading to a paid plan removes the daily limit.

How to avoid it: keep free-tier projects small and finish one feature per day. Do not start a big build on the free plan expecting to work through the evening.

Trap 2: free tokens reset on the 1st and never roll over

Bolt’s support centre states that free plan tokens reset on the 1st of each calendar month. Unused free tokens do not carry into the next month. If you sign up on the 25th and use nothing, your 1,000,000 monthly allowance simply vanishes on the 1st.

Paid plans are different. The Pro card says unused tokens roll over to the next month. But Bolt’s own pages disagree about how long. The support wording says one month. Another line on the pricing page says up to 2 months. Either way, rollover is a paid feature only.

How to avoid it: if you are on the free tier, plan work near the start of the month. Do not treat the free quota as a bank you can save up.

Trap 3: “free” comes with a watermark and no commercial green light

The free tier lets you build public and private projects, upload files up to 10MB, host a site with up to 333,000 web requests, and create unlimited databases. That sounds like a real product. Two catches:

• Every free site carries Bolt branding. The watermark stays until you pay.
• Our check flags the free tier as not intended for commercial use. If you plan to put a client’s logo on it, that is a Pro job.

How to avoid it: use free for throwaway prototypes and demos. The moment a real customer will see the site, budget for Pro.

Trap 4: the list price is US$25, but the real price depends on how you buy and how you quit

Pro is US$25 per month, billed monthly. That is the number on the card. The page also advertises “Save up to 28% with yearly billing”, which brings Pro to an average of US$18 per month if you pay for a year up front. Bolt does not publish the yearly total as a single figure.

Teams is US$30 per member per month. A “seat” or “member” means one person with a login, so a five-person team pays five times that. Yearly billing brings Teams to an average of US$27 per member per month. Enterprise has no published price. You have to ask for a quote.

Now the hidden part. The pricing page embeds a JSON block that contains a set of Stripe discount codes. They sit under a feature flag called “cancellation-save-flow”. In plain terms, these are the offers Bolt shows you when you click cancel. The list includes 33% off for 1 month, 50% off for 1 month, 33% off for 3 months, 50% off for 3 months, a US$9 Lite plan, and a 30-day pause. None of these appear on the visible pricing page. Bolt publishes no conditions for who gets which offer.

How to avoid overpaying: if you are about to cancel anyway, walk through the cancel flow before you confirm. You may be offered a cheaper month, a pause, or the US$9 Lite plan. If you know you will use Bolt for a year, the yearly rate at US$18 per month is the only discount Bolt states openly.

☀️ AMO, the budget-minded cat

AMO’s question is simple: is free enough, and if not, is US$25 a fair price?

Free is enough for a weekend prototype. You get 300,000 tokens a day, private projects, 10MB uploads, hosting with 333,000 web requests, and unlimited databases. For a landing page or a small internal tool you show to three people, that covers it. The watermark is the cost, not cash.

Free stops being enough the day you hit the daily cap mid-build. That happens sooner than the 1,000,000 monthly figure suggests, because a growing project sends more context on every message. And because free tokens reset on the 1st with no rollover, a quiet month is wasted money you never spent.

Pro at US$25 per month gives you 10,000,000 tokens with no daily limit, and unused tokens roll over. That is a different product, not a bigger allowance. AMO’s read: pay for Pro only in months you are actively building. Then use the cancel flow, where Bolt’s own code offers a 30-day pause or a US$9 Lite plan, rather than paying US$25 for a month you will not touch. If you are certain you will build all year, yearly billing at an average of US$18 per month is the honest discount. Teams at US$30 per member is only worth it if you truly need shared billing and admin controls, because Pro deliberately excludes centralized billing, team access management, SSO, and audit logs.

🌙 PIMI, the performance-minded cat

PIMI cares whether Bolt actually does the job, and whether paying changes the quality.

It does. The Pro card lists a Bolt Agent with Speed High and Intelligence High, marked Pro only. Free users run the same agent name but without those settings. Bolt does not publish benchmark numbers, so we cannot say how much faster or smarter. But the fact that the setting exists tells you the free tier is a deliberately throttled experience, not just a smaller quota.

The quota shape matters more for performance than the size. On free, the 300,000 daily cap forces you to stop in the middle of a debugging loop. That is the worst place to stop, because the next day you re-explain the context and burn tokens doing it. Pro’s 10,000,000 tokens per month with no daily ceiling let you finish a session.

Pro also removes the hard walls that break a real deployment. File upload rises from 10MB to 100MB. Hosting rises from 333,000 to 1,000,000 web requests. You get a custom domain, SEO boosting, expanded database capacity, a choice of database provider, private site sharing, and AI image editing. None of these exist on free. For anything you intend to launch, free is a demo and Pro is the product.

PIMI’s read: if the output quality on free frustrates you, that may be the throttled agent rather than the tool. Try one Pro month before you judge Bolt. If it still cannot build what you need, cancel and take the discount offer on the way out.

Verdict: who should use it, who should skip it

Use the free tier if you want a quick prototype, can live with a watermark, and can plan your work around a 300,000 token day and a reset on the 1st.

Pay for Pro at US$25 per month if you are launching a real site. You need the custom domain, the 100MB uploads, the 1,000,000 web requests, and the no-daily-limit agent. Buy yearly at an average of US$18 per month only if you are sure you will build for twelve months.

Skip Teams unless you need seat-level admin, and skip Enterprise unless you are ready to negotiate a quote.

And before you ever cancel, read the cancel screen. Bolt’s own pricing page carries codes for 33% and 50% off, a US$9 Lite plan, and a 30-day pause. Bolt does not tell you they exist. Now you know.

Written: 2026-09-16 Price last verified: 2026-09-16 Tool last health-checked: 2026-09-16

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📎 Sources

All prices and quotas in this article come from AMPM’s verified dataset for Bolt (last verified 2026-09-16); primary sources:

• https://bolt.new/pricing
• https://bolt.new

🐾 Meet the cats: AMO and PIMI

AMPM is a Taiwan-based AI-tool pricing watchdog. Our motto: ask before you subscribe. Two cats argue every tool from two sides:

• ☀️ AMO — the budget-minded cat. Always asks: is the free tier enough, and is paying actually worth it?
• 🌙 PIMI — the performance-minded cat. Cares about whether it works well, fast, and gets your job done.

When they are done arguing, you know whether to pay. Every number is checked by us, with the verification date at the end.

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