Zep pricing is not a small line-item question any more for a team that built on the self-hosted Community Edition. There is no self-hosted tier left below Enterprise, and Enterprise means a sales conversation, not a price on a page. If you are trying to work out what staying with Zep actually costs now versus leaving, this is the number, not the mechanics of migrating them.
What zep pricing actually looks like today
Zep's own pricing page lists three self-serve tiers and one custom one. Free gives a small monthly credit allowance on two projects. Flex is $125 a month, or $104 a month billed annually, for 50,000 credits, 600 requests per minute and 5 projects. Flex Plus is $375 a month for 200,000 credits and 1,000 requests per minute. Enterprise is custom, with unlimited projects, a guaranteed SLA, and deployment options listed as "Cloud, Cloud plus BYOK, or BYOC."
That last line is the one worth reading twice. Bring Your Own Cloud, meaning something close to self-hosting, sits only inside the negotiated Enterprise tier. There is no self-serve, credit-card checkout path to running Zep on your own infrastructure any more. If your team is still on Community Edition specifically because you did not want a vendor-managed instance, that option has moved behind a sales call.
How much does zep cost now, in concrete terms
Annualised, Flex works out to roughly $1,250 a year for 50,000 credits a month, which Zep bills per Episode: one credit for an episode up to 350 bytes, and an additional credit for every further 350 bytes. A team ingesting large documents or long conversation turns will burn through that allowance faster than the credit count alone suggests, and Flex auto-tops-up at 20% remaining, adding 10,000 credits for $25 each time, which is a real and easy-to-miss way the effective annual cost climbs above the headline $1,250.
| Plan | Price | What you get | Self-hosting |
|---|---|---|---|
| Zep Community Edition (legacy) | Free | Full product, unmaintained since April 2025 | Yes, at your own risk, no fixes |
| Zep Free | $0/mo | Small monthly credit allowance, 2 projects | No |
| Zep Flex | $125/mo, or ~$1,250/yr billed annually | 50,000 credits/mo, 600 req/min, 5 projects | No |
| Zep Flex Plus | $375/mo | 200,000 credits/mo, 1,000 req/min, 10 projects | No |
| Zep Enterprise | Custom | Unlimited projects, SLA | Only tier with BYOC |
| Mem0 Pro (for comparison) | $249/mo | 500,000 add / 50,000 retrieval requests, unlimited projects | Separate open-source library exists |
| Letta Cloud (for comparison) | $20/mo base | Per-agent and per-second metering on top | Yes, self-hosted core stays free |
Table 1: Zep's published pricing tiers as of Q3 2026, alongside two comparable agent-memory vendors for context. Zep and Mem0 figures from each vendor's own pricing page; Letta figure from Letta's published plans page.
Is zep flex pricing expensive compared to what community edition used to cost
Community Edition cost nothing except your own infrastructure and engineering time, so any comparison to Flex is a comparison to zero dollars in licensing plus whatever a self-managed Postgres or graph database instance was actually costing you. For a small team, that could genuinely have been cheaper than $1,250 a year. For a team that was spending real engineer-hours keeping an unmaintained fork patched and working, Flex may be a fair trade even before counting the managed infrastructure it buys. The honest answer is that "expensive" depends on what your self-hosting actually cost you in practice, not on the sticker price alone.
"The existing repository will remain open under the Apache 2.0 license, but we will no longer provide updates or active support."
Zep, Announcing a New Direction for Zep's Open Source Strategy
That line is the whole story in one sentence. Nothing was deleted. Nothing is illegal to keep running. What changed is that Zep stopped being a project you could reasonably plan a production system around for free, and started being a paid product with a free-to-look-at, unmaintained ancestor sitting in a legacy folder.
Why this happened, and why it matters for pricing specifically
Zep's own explanation, published in April 2025 and updated as recently as June 2026, is that maintaining a fully open-source, community-supported edition alongside a feature-rich commercial multi-tenant service pulled the two products in different directions, and design choices made for one kept constraining the other. The resolution was to stop investing in Community Edition and put the open-source effort behind Graphiti, the temporal knowledge graph engine that actually powers Zep's memory reasoning.
That is a coherent business decision, and it is worth taking at face value rather than reading it as a bait-and-switch. But the pricing consequence is specific: a company can open-source the engine underneath a product while still closing off the product itself, and that is exactly what happened here. Graphiti is genuinely still Apache 2.0 licensed and actively developed. Zep, the thing most Community Edition users were actually running, is not available to self-host any more except through Enterprise.
What does zep community edition retirement mean if you are still running it today
Practically, three things. First, security and bug fixes stopped arriving in April 2025, so anything discovered since has had no official patch. Second, the ecosystem around it (tutorials, compatible client libraries, community troubleshooting) has been quietly moving on, so support gets harder to find with each passing quarter even though nobody deleted anything. Third, and most relevant to a pricing decision, staying on Community Edition is no longer "the free tier of a supported product." It is running unmaintained software indefinitely, which has its own slow-accumulating cost even at zero dollars in licence fees.
What the alternatives actually cost, for real comparison
Mem0's own pricing page lists a Pro tier at $249 a month for 500,000 add requests and 50,000 retrieval requests a month with unlimited projects, roughly double Zep Flex's annualised monthly rate but with a genuinely separate open-source library available underneath it for teams that want to self-host the core rather than pay for the managed service. Letta's published plans price its cloud tier far lower, at $20 a month base plus metered charges per agent and per second of tool execution, while its self-hosted core remains free software you can run yourself with no equivalent Enterprise gate.
None of these three vendors are pricing identical products. Zep and Mem0 are both selling managed memory infrastructure with meaningfully different feature sets behind the number, and Letta's base price looks cheap mostly because its metering happens elsewhere, per agent and per second. Our fuller comparison of Zep against alternatives built around temporal memory goes through what each one is actually good at, and a direct Mem0 versus Zep comparison puts the two head to head on capability rather than price alone. The vs/zep page covers where a permission-aware, condensed memory store like Contextely fits against Zep specifically.
What to actually do if you are deciding right now
If your workload genuinely depends on temporal graph reasoning, meaning you query how a fact changed or got superseded across specific points in time rather than just retrieving the current answer, Zep Flex or running Graphiti yourself are the realistic options, and Flex's roughly $1,250 a year buys you out of operating that infrastructure. If your actual usage pattern is closer to "find the relevant fact and cite where it came from," which is a narrower and more common need than the graph pitch usually implies, a condensed, permission-aware memory store can answer that without a credit-metered subscription or an Enterprise sales call at all.
Either way, do not let the retirement of a free tier become an argument for the wrong migration. Our practical migration guide walks through the mechanics of moving content across if you decide a different self-hosted system fits better, including what genuinely does not port from a temporal graph to a lexical or condensed store. If you want to see what a self-hosted alternative with no credit metering actually costs to run, Contextely's pricing is a straightforward comparison point against the numbers above.
Frequently asked questions
The numbers here reflect Zep's, Mem0's and Letta's published pricing pages as read in Q3 2026, and pricing pages change without much notice, so treat the exact figures as a snapshot rather than a permanent fact. What should hold up longer is the shape of the decision: Community Edition's retirement did not delete any code, but it did close the free, self-serve path to self-hosting Zep specifically, and that is a different, more permanent change than a quarterly price adjustment would be.