Costs and privacy

What costs money

Alien itself is free in the beta. Only steps that call an AI model cost anything, and they’re paid to OpenRouter from your own credit.

Step	About
Describing a component (Claude Haiku 5.5)	US$0.002 a component
3D object; 2D object and symbol in the next beta (Claude Sonnet 5.5)	US$0.01–0.02 a design
Material, scale figure, scale tree (image model)	US$0.03 an image
Display mode, next beta	US$0.005 a look
Project agent (Claude Sonnet 5.5), next beta	US$0.03–0.15 a request, more when it looks at the viewport
Site map, site views, branch picker, the whole building suite, and (next beta) views and layouts	Free

Only Generate spends credit. Every component that calls a model waits for its Generate button. Everything it makes is cached, so moving sliders, resizing, changing tile sizes and reopening files is free. A design made before comes back free too.

Every request in the panel shows what it cost. Set a credit limit on your OpenRouter key and you’ll never spend more than you meant to. Or run a local model through Ollama and pay nothing per request.

Hosted plans with credits, so you don’t need a key at all, are coming soon. The waitlist hears first.

What gets sent where

When you	What’s sent	To
Describe a component	Your request, the current script, short summaries of the wired inputs	The model you picked, through OpenRouter
Generate an object, material, figure or tree	Only the prompt, and the reference image if you give one	The model, through OpenRouter
Use the site map	The address; for terrain, trees and streets, only the map box	Vicmap, and OpenStreetMap Nominatim as a fallback; open data services
Let the library sort itself	The header comments of uncategorised scripts, never their code	The describe model

Requests through OpenRouter go only to providers that don’t store or train on prompts. With a local model, nothing leaves your machine. Your Rhino file is never sent.

Code runs as you

Scripts, including ones a model writes and ones you’re sent, run inside Rhino with your user’s permissions. They can read files you can read, including your settings file. Read shared scripts before you run them.

The public library, coming soon, will review components before they can be installed, and show you the code and anything flagged before you install it.

Get started

Using Alien

Ready-made components

Reference

Costs and privacy

What costs money

What gets sent where

Your key

Code runs as you

The agent server

​What costs money

​What gets sent where

​Your key

​Code runs as you

​The agent server

What costs money

What gets sent where

Your key

Code runs as you

The agent server