Bolt.new Buyer's Checklist: Tokens, Refunds, Data and Plan Gates

Before you pay for Bolt.new (Bolt), check six areas: how fast your project will burn tokens, what happens to tokens you do not use, whether you need an individual plan or per-member Teams seats, which features force a higher plan, where your code and data live, and how security, AI training and support work on your plan. The entry point is Pro, 10M tokens a month, at $25 per month billed monthly or $18 per month billed yearly ($216 a year) ^[1]. Our verdict is short. Size tokens to the project, start monthly, and read the refund rule first, because there is no trial of paid plans.

Check 1: will your project eat the token budget?

Bolt meters tokens, not messages. A token measures the work the agent does: reading your prompt, reading and syncing project files, planning, and writing code. Most usage comes from that file reading, so a bigger project costs more per message even when the prompt itself is short. The plan selector estimates about 100 messages for 10M tokens, but that is Bolt's estimate rather than an allowance. In the help center's walkthrough, a small sample app used about 204K tokens for its first build and about 70K for a minor title change. Treat those as scale, not a forecast.

• Estimate project size honestly: many screens, files beyond roughly 700 lines and Markdown record-keeping files fill the context fast.
• Lean on token-free tools: Code view edits, terminal commands, version restores, and the Publish and Run security audit buttons spend nothing.
• Decide whether you need Max. It handles large apps and refactors, spends more tokens per prompt, and runs only on paid plans.
• Note what spends extra: Attempt fix clicks, saved visual edits, dictation, active connectors and AI image generation.

Free gives 1M tokens a month with a 300K daily limit, and only Free has a daily cap. By our arithmetic, that daily limit can be hit on at most three full days before the monthly bucket runs dry. At the cap you can still edit code by hand in Code view, and AI work resumes when the daily bar refreshes. Paid plans drop the daily limit, so the monthly allotment plus unexpired rollover (and any reload tokens, on eligible plans) becomes the ceiling. Pro then climbs through levels chosen on the pricing page, up to 900M tokens a month at $1,500 per month billed monthly or $1,350 per month billed yearly.

Check 2: what happens to unused tokens, and to your money

Unused paid tokens roll over, but only inside a window. They stay valid for two months from the start of the billing cycle in which they arrived, only while the subscription is active, and the oldest tokens are spent first ^[2]. Free tokens never roll over. Token reloads exist only on the highest monthly Pro level or on any annual Pro plan; reload tokens never expire, yet Bolt publishes no reload price. Everywhere else, running dry means waiting for renewal or moving up a level.

• Canceling keeps the plan until the period ends; then every allocated token, rollover included, is lost unless you re-subscribe before it expires.
• An annual plan can be downgraded only at the next annual renewal, possibly a year away.
• A failed payment left unresolved drops the account to Free and loses rollover until you re-subscribe.

The refund rule should decide your billing term. Subscription fees are non-refundable except where the law requires, and consumed AI usage stays non-refundable even when the output disappoints or must be regenerated ^[3]. Domains bought through Bolt are final too. Bolt advertises savings of up to 28% with yearly billing, but that figure holds only for Pro at 10M. By our arithmetic, Pro 10M costs $300 over 12 months billed monthly against one $216 yearly charge, saving $84 a year. From the 26M level upward, Pro's yearly billing saves 10%. Commit yearly only if you expect to keep the plan for close to the full year, because the one charge is not refunded and paying monthly stays cheaper for shorter stays.

Check 3: one person, or a team paying per member?

Free and Pro are individual plans. An account belongs to one named person, and sharing logins or running concurrent sessions to stretch limits is prohibited. Teams is priced per member, starting at $30 per member per month billed monthly or $27 per member per month billed yearly ($324 a year per member) for 10M tokens a month. The card talks about shared capacity, yet each paid member gets a separate allotment and tokens are never shared or pooled. A member without a paid seat can view team projects but cannot prompt. Whoever sends a prompt pays from their own tokens, even on someone else's project.

By our arithmetic, a Teams seat at 10M costs $5 more per month billed monthly ($60 a year, 20% more) and $9 more per month billed yearly ($108 a year, 50% more) than one Pro account at the same level. A three-member team at that level pays, by our arithmetic, $90 per month billed monthly ($1,080 a year) or $81 per month billed yearly ($972 a year). The premium buys centralized billing, admin controls, team templates, private NPM registries and the right to add your own design system, and Teams workspaces are excluded from the AI-training default. Without those needs, separate Pro accounts cost less at the entry levels; from 180M upward the two cost the same per month.

• Seats: a removed member's seat stays occupied until the period ends on a monthly plan, or until the next monthly billing anniversary on an annual plan, and the member loses their tokens at once.
• Client access: inviting people outside the team is off by default until an admin turns on external collaboration, and the default project role is Viewer.

Check 4: which features push you up a plan

Read the Free plan closely. It allows private projects, but every site it publishes is public and carries the badge. Uploads differ too: Free takes 5 attachments per message and files up to 10MB, while paid plans take 20 and up to 100MB, though Bolt reads each attachment only up to 5 MB. AI image generation on paid plans is off by default and is turned on in account settings. Pre-loaded design systems such as Chakra, Material UI and Shadcn work on every plan. Enterprise has no published price. Skip Lite: it was a $9-a-month Forge-only plan that closed to new sign-ups in October 2026 (existing subscribers keep it).

Check 5: where your data, code and sites will live

Bolt Database is on every plan. It is built on PostgreSQL and runs on Supabase infrastructure managed by Bolt. Using your own Supabase needs Pro or Teams, and the choice is sticky: a Bolt account connects to only one Supabase organization and cannot change it, there is no flow back from Supabase to a Bolt database, and connecting Supabase to a project that already has a Bolt database replaces it and may lose data. Choose the database at project start. Our Bolt Cloud guide walks through claiming.

On code, the Terms say you keep the rights in your content, including AI input and output. StackBlitz assigns you its rights in AI output only to the extent the law allows, subject to third-party model rights, and warns that the same output may reach other users and may not be copyrightable. Reviewing it before deployment is your job. The export paths are GitHub two-way sync, on every plan, and a zip download on desktop. Exports carry code, not secrets, and disconnecting GitHub is permanent; the GitHub guide covers sync.

Hosting limits apply to the whole Bolt account, so every published site shares one allowance ^[4]. Free stops at 10 GB of bandwidth and 333,333 requests a month, a hard limit: the site goes offline until the reset. Paid plans get 30 GB and 1 million requests a month, with optional pay-as-you-go up to a cap you set, priced nowhere we read. A project must stay under 100MB to publish. One more trap matters. Restoring an earlier version rolls back code but never the database, so back up data separately.

Check 6: security, AI training and support

Bolt runs two security checks. The database security check works on every plan. The project security audit in the Publish menu is for paid plans, spends no tokens, allows up to 30 runs a day, and reviews code and database for access control, auth, secrets and injection issues; Bolt itself calls it a first pass. Bolt says it holds SOC 2 Type 2 and lists GDPR and CCPA, with the report available through sales. We found no HIPAA claim and no BAA.

Training is opt-out. Unless you switch it off, eligible content created from October 2026 on individual accounts outside the EEA, UK and Switzerland may train AI models and be licensed to third parties as de-identified datasets, including for compensation. Teams and Enterprise workspaces are excluded. The opt-out is free on any plan, takes effect within 15 days, and does not undo training already done. Check the setting on day one.

Support follows the plan. Free relies on the community Discord. Paid plans get email support, sent from the account's own email address and answered Monday to Friday during business hours, with no response-time commitment. Enterprise adds 24/7 priority support, a dedicated manager and a private Slack channel. Trustpilot reviewers complain most often about support, account access and price. For the full plan ladder, see our pricing breakdown.

The bottom line

Bolt.new is worth paying for once you know your project's token appetite and your exit costs. Run a real build on Free, watch the daily and monthly bars, and move to Pro monthly before considering yearly billing, since nothing is refundable except where the law requires. Teams makes sense when you need admin controls, your own design system or a workspace excluded from the AI-training default, because every seat carries its own tokens. Pick your database at the start, turn off training if it matters, and keep backups outside Bolt.