Manus AI in 2026 costs $0 on the Free plan, $20 to $200 per month on Pround from $20 per seat per month on Team, all running on a credit-based system that decides what each task actually costs. That price range alone hides a lot of tradeoffs, because a single deep-research task can quietly burn through 900 to 1,000+ credits of your monthly allocation, and Manus does not tell you the cost before you hit go.
This guide breaks down every current plan, exactly how the credit system works, what $20, $40, or $200 of credits really buys you in tasks, and how Manus stacks up against fixed-price alternatives. We also cover the news every existing user is asking about, China blocking Meta’s $2 billion Manus acquisition on April 27, 2026, and what it means for the product roadmap and your subscription.
The Key Takeaways
- Manus AI pricing in 2026: Free at $0/month, Pro from $20 to $200/month, Team from $20 per seat per month with a 2-member minimum.
- The Free plan includes 300 daily refresh credits, 1 concurrent task, and access to Manus 1.6 Lite in Agent Mode.
- Annual billing saves 17% across every paid plan, and the $40 Pro tier comes with a 7-day free trial.
- Credits do not roll over month to month, but purchased add-on credits never expire as long as your paid subscription stays active.
- Meta announced a $2 billion takeover of Manus in December 2025, but China’s regulator blocked the deal on April 27, 2026, leaving the company’s ownership in limbo.
How Much Does Manus AI Cost in 2026?
Manus AI is built around a single idea: you do not pay per seat or per query, you pay for the work the agent actually does. That is why Manus AI pricing is structured as a baseline subscription plus a pool of credits that gets spent on every task the agent runs.
The simplified 2026 lineup, listed on the official Manus pricing page, has three plans: Free, Pro, and Team. Pro is technically one plan with three price points ($20, $40, and $200 per month), each tier giving you a bigger monthly credit pool. Team starts at $20 per seat per month with a minimum of two members, and adds shared credit pools, admin controls, and priority support. Manus rebranded its older Basic, Plus, and Pro tiers in early 2026, and the manus.im help center notes that legacy subscribers keep their original price until they upgrade or downgrade.
Manus AI Free Plan
The Free plan costs $0 per month and is actually usable, not a watered-down trial. You get 300 daily refresh credits that reset every 24 hours, 1 concurrent task, 2 scheduled tasks, plus access to Chat Mode und Manus 1.6 Lite in Agent Mode. New users also receive a 1,000-credit one-time starter pack, useful for testing one or two real workflows before you decide to upgrade.
The catch: 300 credits is enough for a few short chat queries or one moderate slide deck, but a single deep-research run can drain the entire daily pool in one shot. Free is for testing, not production.
Manus AI Pro Plan
The Pro plan is where most paid users land. The pricing scales with how heavily you use the agent.
The entry tier is $20 per month for 4,000 monthly credits, and the mid tier is $40 per month for 8,000 credits, which also includes the only 7-day free trial Manus offers. The top tier is $200 per month for 40,000 credits, designed for teams running constant deep-research or long-running development tasks. All three Pro tiers include 20 concurrent tasks, 20 scheduled tasks, and access to Manus 1.6, 1.6 Max, and 1.6 Lite in Agent Mode, plus advanced features like Wide Research, slide generation, and website deployment.
Manus AI Team Plan
The Team plan starts at $20 per seat per month with a 2-member minimum, and the per-seat price scales the same way Pro does for higher credit allocations. Each seat ships with 8,000+ monthly credits, 300 daily refresh credits, shared credit pools that any teammate can draw from, SSO, access controlsund usage analytics. It is the only plan that gives admins central billing and visibility into who is burning credits on what.
Manus AI Pricing Plans Compared
Here is the full Manus AI pricing comparison at a glance, current as of May 2026.
| Plan | Monthly price | Annual price | Monthly credits | Daily refresh | Concurrent tasks | Models in Agent Mode |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | $0 | 0 (300 daily refresh + 1,000 one-time starter) | 300 | 1 | Manus 1.6 Lite |
| Pro $20 | $20 | ~$200/yr (save 17%) | 4,000 | 300 | 20 | 1.6 Lite + 1.6 + 1.6 Max |
| Pro $40 | $40 (7-day trial) | ~$400/yr | 8,000 | 300 | 20 | 1.6 Lite + 1.6 + 1.6 Max |
| Pro $200 | $200 | ~$2,000/yr | 40,000 | 300 | 20 | 1.6 Lite + 1.6 + 1.6 Max |
| Team | From $20/seat (min. 2) | Save 17% | 8,000+ per seat | 300 per seat | 20 | 1.6 Lite + 1.6 + 1.6 Max |
The cleanest way to think about it: $20 of Manus is roughly $0.005 per credit, $40 is also roughly $0.005, and the $200 tier drops the effective rate to $0.005 as well. The pricing is linear, so the only reason to jump tiers is needing more credits than the lower one delivers, not better per-credit value.
If you want to see how Manus pricing compares with the rest of the market, our ai pricing comparison roundup puts it next to ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok, and DeepSeek in one table.
How Manus AI Credits Work
The Manus AI credit system is the single biggest source of confusion, and the single biggest source of complaints, in the entire product. Understanding it is the difference between a $20 plan that lasts the month and a $20 plan that vanishes in a weekend.
According to the manus.im help center on credit consumption, credits are spent only during active task processing. Storage, completed tasks, and idle time cost nothing. Three things drive what a task actually costs. The first is LLM tokens consumed for task planning, decision-making, and final output generation. The second is virtual machines that power the agent’s cloud workspace, including file operations, browser automation, and code execution. The third is third-party APIs for integrated services like financial data, market research, and professional databases.
That is why two tasks that look identical from the outside can cost wildly different amounts. A simple chat answer that uses one short LLM call costs 10 to 50 credits. A slide generation that browses the web for images runs a few hundred credits. A deep autonomous research task that spins up a virtual machine, runs Wide Research across dozens of subtasks, and writes a long report can hit 500 to 900 credits. Complex multi-step work has been reported to clear 1,000+ credits in a single run.
Do Manus AI Credits Roll Over?
No. Plan credits reset at the start of each billing cycle, and any unused balance from your monthly allocation disappears. Daily refresh credits (the 300-per-day pool on every plan) reset every 24 hours and also do not accumulate. The only credits that persist are purchased add-on credit packs, which never expire as long as you keep an active paid subscription. If you downgrade to Free, those add-on credits go inactive until you upgrade again.
Can You Estimate What a Task Will Cost Before Running It?
Manus shows you an estimated credit range in the dashboard before you launch a task, but the help center is clear that the final cost is determined by complexity and duration once the agent actually runs. In practice, the estimate is a guide, not a guarantee, and the most common Reddit and Trustpilot complaint about Manus AI pricing is users reporting that a task they expected to cost a few hundred credits ended up costing more than 900.
What Does $20, $40, or $200 of Manus Actually Buy You?
Most pricing guides stop at the credit numbers and never tell you how many real tasks that translates to. Manus does not publish fixed per-task prices, so the math below uses the consumption ranges quoted in third-party reviews and user reports. Treat it as a working estimate, not a guarantee.
$20 Pro plan, 4,000 credits per month: Roughly 80 to 400 simple chat or quick-research tasks at 10 to 50 credits each, or about 8 to 12 deep-research runs at 300 to 500 credits each, or 4 to 5 complex multi-step automations at 800 to 1,000 credits each. Best for individuals running occasional agent tasks, not daily heavy work.
$40 Pro plan, 8,000 credits per month: Roughly 160 to 800 light tasks, 16 to 25 deep-research runs, or 8 to 10 complex automations. The 7-day free trial makes this the right tier for testing whether Manus actually fits your workflow before paying.
$200 Pro plan, 40,000 credits per month: Roughly 80 to 130 deep-research runs, 40 to 50 complex automations, or near-daily heavy use. This is the tier you need if Manus is becoming a core production tool, not a side experiment.
Free plan, 300 daily + 1,000 starter: Realistically one or two deep-research tasks total, plus a handful of short chat queries per day after the starter pack is gone. Enough to see if the agent works for your use case, not enough to ship anything serious.
If you do mostly the same kind of task every time, your effective cost-per-task will land near one end of those ranges. If your workflow is varied, expect to land somewhere in the middle. The volatility is the point Manus users complain about, and the reason fixed-price alternatives like ChatGPT Plus und Claude Pro keep showing up in Manus AI pricing debates.
Manus 1.6 Lite vs 1.6 vs 1.6 Max: Which Model You Get on Each Plan
The company ships three model variants in Agent Mode, and your plan decides which ones you can actually run.
Manus 1.6 Lite is the entry-level model and the only one available on the Free plan. It is fast and cheap on credits, but capped on capability for long, autonomous tasks.
Manus 1.6 is the standard agent on every Pro and Team plan. It handles most real workflows: research, slides, websites, light code projects.
Manus 1.6 Max is the flagship released in late 2025 and is included on every Pro and Team tier. According to Manus’s release blog, double-blind tests showed user satisfaction increased by over 19.2% versus the prior version, with significant gains across information retrieval, spreadsheet handling, web development, and data analysis benchmarks. All sub-agents in Wide Research also run on the Max architecture, so parallel research tasks get the upgrade automatically.
The 1.6 release also added Mobile Development (build iOS and Android apps from a prompt) and Design View (an interactive image canvas with point-and-click edits). Both consume credits like any other task, with Design View landing on the higher end because of the rendering cost.
Add-On Credits, Annual Billing, and the Free Trial
Three details inside Manus AI pricing quietly move the math more than the headline plan price.
Annual Billing
Switching from monthly to annual on any paid plan saves 17%, which is roughly two months free per year. On the $20 Pro tier that is about $40 saved per year; on the $200 tier it is about $400 saved per year. The catch: you commit upfront, so test on a monthly subscription first.
The 7-Day Free Trial
Manus only offers it on the $40 Pro tier, not the $20 entry tier. If you are deciding between tiers, starting on $40 with the trial gives you a real week to burn 8,000 credits and learn how fast they go, before deciding whether to keep $40, drop to $20, or jump to $200.
Add-On Credit Packs
Paid subscribers can buy extra credits at any time, and unlike monthly credits these never expire, with one important condition: your paid subscription has to remain active. If you cancel down to Free, the unused add-ons go dormant until you re-subscribe. That is the rule almost no third-party guide spells out, and it is worth checking in the manus.im help center before stockpiling packs.
Is Manus AI Worth the Price in 2026?
The honest answer depends on whether your workflow is predictable. If you mostly run the same kind of agent task day after day, you can get a feel for credit cost within a few weeks. Then you can pick the right Pro tier with confidence. If your work varies wildly, Manus is harder to budget for. The $20 to $200/month Pro range can feel volatile in a way ChatGPT Plus at $20 flat or Gemini Advanced never does.
The case for Manus is that it does things flat-rate chatbots cannot: it actually executes long, multi-step tasks autonomously, with Manus 1.6 Max scoring meaningfully higher than its predecessors on autonomous benchmarks. The agent will go off, browse the web, write code, query APIs, and return a finished artefact, not just an answer. For people building real automations, that is worth the credit-system hassle.
The case against is that the Manus AI credit system is opaque enough that even paid users routinely get hit with surprise bills. Reddit and Trustpilot threads are full of users reporting 900-credit single tasks and entire monthly allocations gone in days. Manus does not show a hard pre-task cost, and there is no “stop at X credits” budget control, so power users sometimes blow through a $20 plan in a weekend.
Then there is the Meta acquisition uncertainty. Meta announced a roughly $2 billion deal to acquire Manus in December 2025, but China’s antitrust regulator blocked the deal on April 27, 2026, after a months-long probe. The product is still running normally, but the long-term ownership question is unresolved, which is worth weighing if you are about to commit to an annual plan.
Cheaper Alternatives if the Credit System Scares You
If unpredictable credit consumption is a dealbreaker, three fixed-price options cover most of what people use Manus for, without the budget anxiety.
ChatGPT Plus at $20 per month gives you GPT-5.5, agent-style task execution through Operator, and unlimited messaging within rate limits. It is the closest like-for-like swap if you are mainly using Manus for research and quick automations. See our full ChatGPT pricing guide for the breakdown.
Claude Pro at $20 per month is the strongest pick for long-form writing, code, and technical research where you need consistency. The full Claude pricing guide covers every tier including the API.
Fello AI at $9.99 per month takes a different approach: one flat price, all the major models in one Mac and iOS app, including Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok, and DeepSeek. You are not running autonomous multi-step agents, but if 80% of what you actually need from Manus is “ask a powerful model a complex question,” Fello AI is the cheapest way to get that across providers without juggling subscriptions.
For deeper context on what autonomous agents are good at and where they hit limits, our guide to how AI agents work and the best AI agents of 2026 roundup put Manus in context with OpenAI Operator, Claude agents, and the rest of the field.
Conclusion: Should You Pay for Manus AI?
Manus AI pricing is straightforward on paper: $0 Free, $20 to $200 Pro, $20+ per seat Team, with 17% off on annual. The credit system is what turns it complicated. Start on Free to test, move to the $40 Pro trial if you want a real week to learn your burn rate, and only commit to $200 or annual billing once you actually know how many credits your workflow consumes.
If you want predictable AI spend instead, the fixed-price options at $9.99 to $20 per month are easier to budget around. If you want autonomous agent execution that flat-rate chatbots cannot match, Manus is still the cleanest paid option, just keep one eye on your credit dashboard.
FAQ
How much does Manus AI cost per month?
Manus AI costs $0 per month on the Free plan, $20 to $200 per month on the Pro plan (depending on credits), and from $20 per seat per month on the Team plan with a 2-member minimum. Annual billing saves 17% across all paid tiers.
Is Manus AI free to use?
Yes. The Free plan is $0 per month and includes 300 daily refresh credits, 1,000 starter credits, 1 concurrent task, 2 scheduled tasks, and access to Manus 1.6 Lite in Agent Mode. It is enough to test the product but not enough to use it heavily.
Do Manus AI credits roll over to the next month?
No, monthly plan credits do not roll over. Daily refresh credits also reset every 24 hours and do not accumulate. Only purchased add-on credit packs persist between months, and only as long as your paid subscription stays active.
Does Manus AI offer a free trial?
Yes, but only on the $40 Pro tier. The trial is 7 days and gives full Pro access, including all three models (1.6 Lite, 1.6, 1.6 Max) and 8,000 credits. The $20 and $200 tiers do not have a separate trial.
Is Manus AI still owned by Meta?
Not officially. Meta announced a roughly $2 billion acquisition in December 2025, but China’s antitrust regulator blocked the deal on April 27, 2026. The product continues to run normally, but the company’s ownership status is unresolved as of May 2026.
What is the cheapest way to get autonomous AI agent capabilities in 2026?
The Manus Free plan is the cheapest entry point at $0 per month for light testing. For paid options, Manus Pro at $20 per month is the lowest tier with full agent access, while OpenAI’s ChatGPT Plus at $20 per month offers Operator-based agent task execution as a fixed-price alternative.
