Free + BYOK = Unlimited dialogue.

The NPC still functions — it just stops updating emotions until the next billing cycle. Dialogue still works (since that uses your own LLM key). The NPC effectively "freezes" its emotional state.

Bring Your Own Key. You provide your own API key from OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepSeek, or any of our 21 supported providers. We never see your key, and we don't add any markup to the model provider's pricing. Dialogue costs are between you and the model provider.

Yes. Neshama is Apache 2.0 licensed. You can run the entire engine locally or on your own infrastructure. The self-hosted version has no emotion calculation limits. Paid tiers add cloud convenience, managed updates, and support.

Because the emotion engine is what we run on our servers. Each calculation involves: stimulus evaluation, emotion update, decay processing, conflict resolution, and threshold checks. This is the actual compute cost. Dialogue generation uses your own LLM key, so we don't charge for that.

Free tier NPCs have fixed personality traits — the OCEAN values you set at creation stay the same forever. Paid tiers unlock dynamic evolution: a repeatedly bullied NPC's agreeableness decreases, a praised NPC's extraversion increases. This makes NPCs feel alive across sessions.

Yes. Each NPC soul has its own personality, emotions, memories, and entity graph. This is what makes each NPC unique. Two tavern keepers with the same preset will diverge over time based on their different experiences.