> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.aliengh.com/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# Costs and privacy

> What costs money, what gets sent where, and what stays on your machine.

## 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 |

<Tip>
  **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.
</Tip>

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.

<Note>Hosted plans with credits, so you don't need a key at all, are coming soon. [The waitlist](https://aliengh.com/#waitlist) hears first.</Note>

## 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.

## Your key

Your OpenRouter key stays in `settings.json` on your computer (owner-only on macOS). It's never written into `.gh` files or scripts, and the panel only shows its first and last few characters.

## 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.

<Note>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.</Note>

## The agent server

Alien's MCP server listens only on your own machine (`127.0.0.1:9876`) and refuses requests from web pages. See [Connect an agent](/guides/connect-an-agent#keep-it-local).


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