Lemmy Plans Pricing
Lemmy is free, open-source software (AGPL-3.0) with no official commercial API pricing tiers. The API is available for free on any public Lemmy instance. Self-hosting is also free; operators pay only their own infrastructure costs. Third-party managed hosting providers such as Elestio offer paid hosting plans starting around $5-10 per month depending on instance size. Rate limits are configured per instance by the instance operator and are not monetized.
Lemmy Plans Pricing is the machine-readable pricing-plan profile for Lemmy on the APIs.io network, conforming to the API Commons Plans specification.
It defines 3 plans, covering free and paid tiers, with named plans including Lemmy API — Free (Public Instance), Lemmy — Self-Hosted, Lemmy — Managed Hosting (Third-Party).
Tagged areas include Communities, Federated, Fediverse, Link Aggregator, and Open-Source.
Plans
Free access to the Lemmy REST API on any public Lemmy instance. No subscription, registration fee, or per-call charge applies. Rate limits are set by the instance operator. The largest public instance is lemmy.world with over 193,000 registered users.
- JWT authentication via /api/v4/account/auth/login
- Posts, comments, communities, voting endpoints
- ActivityPub federation
- Instance-configured rate limits
Run your own Lemmy instance using the open-source software. Infrastructure costs (server, storage, bandwidth) are the operator's responsibility. Docker and Ansible deployment options are provided. Written in Rust for high performance; a single instance supports tens of thousands of users on modest hardware.
- AGPL-3.0 open-source license
- Full API access on your own instance
- Configure your own rate limits
- Join or isolate from the Fediverse
Third-party managed hosting providers such as Elestio offer Lemmy hosting for a monthly fee covering compute, storage, and managed deployment. Pricing varies by provider and selected instance size. Elestio uses hourly credit billing across multiple cloud providers (Hetzner, DigitalOcean, AWS Lightsail, Vultr, Linode, Scaleway, Netcup).
- Managed deployment and updates
- Cloud provider choice
- Storage pricing at ~$0.15/GB/month (Elestio)
- Free trial credits available ($20 for 3 days on Elestio)
Sources
- https://join-lemmy.org/
- https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy
- https://elest.io/open-source/lemmy/resources/plans-and-pricing
Work with this as data
Every plan here is available over the APIs.io API and to AI agents over MCP.