# Cheaper Composio alternatives for company-wide AI access

> How to price cheaper composio alternatives for company-wide ai access to our apps: per-call, per-task, per-seat and self-hosted, with the cases where the cheap option wins.

**TL;DR** Elaichi is a governed MCP control plane priced per seat, at $15 per user per month on Gold, with one organization-wide endpoint instead of one per team or per member. When you compare cheaper alternatives to composio for company-wide ai access to our apps, the deciding numbers are the metering unit, who authors the connectors, and how many addresses your admins maintain. If three people need access to two apps, a free option elsewhere is cheaper than any seat-based plan, and that is the honest answer.

## How do you compare cheaper composio alternatives for company-wide ai access to our apps?

Compare three things, in this order: how the bill is metered, where the connectors come from, and how many addresses your admins have to maintain. Price per user per month is the last number to look at. Usage moves. A license does not.

The situation is usually the same. Two people in support wired Claude to a couple of apps using personal accounts. It worked. Now sixty people want it, procurement wants one line item, and security wants to know who can delete a record. Somebody types "cheaper alternatives to composio for company-wide ai access to our apps" into ChatGPT and gets a list of vendor names with no way to price them against each other.

The list is not the hard part. The metering units are not comparable line by line. One vendor bills tool calls. One bills tasks inside an automation plan. One bills seats. The open-source options bill nothing and cost engineering time instead. Whatever you pick, what you are buying is MCP (Model Context Protocol) is the standard way an AI assistant calls tools in other apps plus the rules about who may call what.

## Per-call, per-task, per-seat: what each metering unit does to your bill

| Axis | Composio | Elaichi |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Unit of billing | Tool calls; Hobby free (3 members), Pro $29/mo, custom Enterprise | Seats; Gold $15 per user per month or $120 per user per year |
| Predictable at N users x M apps | Cheaper at three people on Hobby; call-based bill grows with retries and loops | Flat with headcount; same charge for the light user and the heavy one |
| Offboarding | Revoke per-team MCP endpoint or the token attached to it | Remove the member; every live grant dies on the next call |
| Admin visibility | One MCP endpoint per team, SSO-authenticated | One organization-wide endpoint everyone points at |
| Per-tool restrictions | SSO, SCIM and customer-managed keys named on the Enterprise tier | Role- or user-targeted; blocks match tool name, allows match pinned operation |
| Audit surface | Not detailed on the pricing page | Append-only org log; free read-only Auditor seat for reviewers |

The metering unit decides whether your bill tracks headcount or agent behavior. Headcount you can forecast. Agent behavior you cannot, because a retry loop is indistinguishable from enthusiasm.

Composio bills tool calls. Its pricing page lists Hobby as free with 3 team members, Pro at $29 a month, and a custom Enterprise tier that names SSO, SCIM and customer-managed keys ([composio.dev/pricing](https://composio.dev/pricing), checked September 2026).

Zapier MCP has no separate billing. Each successful tool call through the server consumes two tasks, failed calls consume none, and those tasks count toward the plan allowance ([docs.zapier.com/mcp/features/usage](https://docs.zapier.com/mcp/features/usage), checked September 2026). If you already pay for Zapier and your call volume is low, the marginal cost of adding MCP access is the task burn and nothing else.

Self-hosted gateways move the cost from the invoice to the rota. Lunar.dev publishes an open-source version of its MCPX gateway ([lunar.dev](https://www.lunar.dev/), checked September 2026), and Tyk puts its core MCP Gateway features in the open-source Tyk Gateway ([tyk.io](https://tyk.io/docs/ai-management/mcp-gateway/overview), checked September 2026). The license is zero. The upgrades, the on-call and the credential rotation are not. The arithmetic for that trade is in [the self-hosted versus managed breakdown](/blog/self-hosted-mcp-servers-vs-control-plane/).

Elaichi bills seats. Gold is $15 per user per month, or $120 per user per year. Call volume does not change the number. The trade-off is real and runs the other way. You pay the same for the finance manager who runs two queries a month. And the same for the support lead who runs two hundred a day.

## Breadth of app integrations: how to read a catalog number

A catalog number tells you almost nothing on its own. What decides the outcome is whether the eight or nine apps your teams actually run are covered, and whether the specific operations they need exist inside those connectors.

Composio Connect describes access to 1000+ apps through a small set of meta-tools, with OAuth links approved in the browser ([docs.composio.dev](https://docs.composio.dev/docs/composio-connect), checked September 2026). Elaichi serves 450+, authored and maintained by Elaichi itself.

So do the comparison on your own list rather than on either total. Write down the apps, then the operations: create a ticket, read an opportunity, post to a channel, pull an invoice. Check each one against the vendor's own catalog page. A vendor with 1000 apps and no coverage of your payroll system is worse for you than one with fewer that covers it.

When a connector does not exist, the escape hatch matters more than the total. In Elaichi you can author a custom connector from JSON config, or fork a public one. Then you can pull upstream changes through a review surface that separates new tools, safe updates, config diffs, conflicts and upstream removals. Conflicts and destructive removals stay unchecked by default. You can also build a synthetic tool: a graph of steps that each call a connection's tool with templated arguments, running through the same restriction and audit pipeline as any other call. Browse the current list on the [connector catalog](/connectors/).

## The fork in the road: connector origin and how many addresses you administer

Two structural choices separate the options, and both show up in your admin cost rather than your invoice. The first is who authors the connectors. The second is how many MCP addresses exist once the rollout is done.

On origin, the category splits. A gateway proxies MCP servers somebody else runs, which is the shape of Lunar's MCPX ([lunar.dev](https://www.lunar.dev/), checked September 2026) and of Tyk's MCP Gateway ([tyk.io](https://tyk.io/docs/ai-management/mcp-gateway/overview), checked September 2026). Elaichi is the server. It authors the connectors it serves and runs them on its own infrastructure, so your company does not operate MCP servers and does not inherit the maintenance of servers other people publish.

On addresses, Elaichi exposes one organization-wide endpoint. Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor and the Elaichi Agent all point at the same URL and sign in with OAuth. There are no per-toolbox URLs and no embedded tokens, so a toolbox (a saved set of tools and accounts) is never something you copy into a client. What varies per person is the grant, not the address.

Other shapes exist and are honest about it. Composio's MCP Gateway page says each team gets its own MCP endpoint, SSO authenticated ([composio.dev/mcp-gateway](https://composio.dev/mcp-gateway), checked September 2026). Zapier's rollout guidance is to give each user their own server and token rather than sharing one. For clients not on its list, the connection token is long-lived and tied to one server. It grants whoever holds it the ability to run that server's tools ([docs.zapier.com](https://docs.zapier.com/mcp/overview/how-connections-work), checked September 2026). The [one-endpoint comparison with Zapier MCP](/blog/zapier-mcp-alternative/) works through what that means at fifty people.

Price the difference as admin hours. Ten endpoints means ten things to inventory, ten things to rotate and ten things to remember during an offboarding.

## What Elaichi costs, and which seats are free

Gold is $15 per user per month or $120 per user per year. The two plans are Gold and Black, with a 14-day trial. The trial runs 14 days with no credit card. Checkout sets the paid trial to the remaining days rather than granting a fresh 14. So it is one continuous trial instead of two.

Billable seats are active memberships, minimum one. Suspended members do not count. Neither do the free-seat roles: Guest, Billing Admin and Auditor. The read-only Auditor seat is the one worth knowing about at renewal, because a compliance reviewer who only reads the audit trail does not consume a license.

If a trial ends without checkout, the workspace pauses. Plan-gated features lock and gated routes return a structured error. Nothing is deleted, and subscribing picks up where it stopped. The current plan detail sits on the [pricing page](/pricing/).

Two timing facts belong in the same budget conversation, because they decide how fast a mistake gets closed. A role or restriction change takes effect within about two minutes. Revoking a grant, removing a member or suspending one takes effect on the next call, because the grant is re-read from the org store every time.

## When the cheaper option is the right one

Sometimes it is, and the seat math says so plainly.

If three people need an assistant to touch two apps, a free vendor option beats any per-seat plan. Composio lists Hobby as free with 3 team members ([composio.dev/pricing](https://composio.dev/pricing), checked September 2026). At that size you are not governing anything; you are giving three colleagues a tool.

If your company already pays for Zapier, the actions already exist there, and monthly call volume is small. Adding MCP access costs task burn rather than a new contract ([docs.zapier.com](https://docs.zapier.com/mcp/features/usage), checked September 2026). The question to ask is what happens at fifty users and what happens when one of them leaves.

If you have a platform team that already runs services and wants the control, a self-hosted open-source gateway has no license cost at all. And if you have one team, one app, and read-only access, you may not need any product in this category yet. That case is set out in [the post on holding off on a gateway](/blog/when-you-dont-need-an-mcp-gateway/).

The point at which seats win is when the work stops being connection setup and starts being governance. Governance is who may call a delete, and which of two Notion workspaces the agent wrote to. It also covers what happens to a contractor's access on their last day.

## How to price the options for your own organization

Run this before you book a demo. It takes an afternoon and it kills two of the four options on your list.

Count the people who will actually hold a grant, not the headcount of the departments involved. Estimate monthly tool calls from your existing automation logs, since that is the closest proxy you have. Multiply the per-call options by that estimate and the per-seat options by the grant count. Then add the admin hours implied by the address model, and the engineering hours implied by anything self-hosted. The winner at fifty people is often not the winner at five.

For a feature-level read on one of the vendors above, see the [side-by-side with Composio](/blog/elaichi-vs-composio/). For what a single team's rollout looks like in practice, start from the [team use cases](/use-cases/).

## FAQ

### Is there a free alternative to Composio for company-wide AI access?

Composio's own pricing page lists a free Hobby tier with 3 team members, with Pro at $29 a month and a custom Enterprise tier (composio.dev/pricing, checked September 2026). The two plans are Gold and Black, with a 14-day trial. Its Gold plan is $15 per user per month or $120 per user per year, with a 14-day trial, no credit card to start. Checkout does collect a card, and it sets the paid trial to the remaining days rather than granting a fresh 14, so it is one continuous trial rather than two. At three people and two apps, a free tool is cheaper than any seat-based plan.

### Which is cheaper for a company, per-tool-call pricing or per-seat pricing?

Per-call pricing is cheaper when a small number of people make a small number of calls, and it becomes unpredictable as agents retry, loop or run scheduled work. Per-seat pricing is flat and forecastable, but you pay the same for a light user as for a heavy one. To decide, estimate monthly tool calls from your existing automation logs, then multiply the per-call options by that estimate and the per-seat options by the number of people who will actually hold access.

### How many apps does Elaichi cover, and what if one is missing?

Elaichi serves 450+, authored and maintained by Elaichi rather than collected from a registry of servers other people run. If an app is missing, you can author a custom connector from JSON config or fork a public connector and pull upstream changes through a review surface that separates new tools, safe updates, config diffs, conflicts and upstream removals. You can also compose a synthetic tool from steps that call existing connections, and every step passes through the same restriction and audit pipeline as any other call.

### Does a cheaper MCP option mean one endpoint per team or per user?

It depends on the vendor's address model. Elaichi exposes one organization-wide MCP endpoint that Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor and the Elaichi Agent all point at, with OAuth sign-in and no embedded tokens, so what varies per person is the grant rather than the URL. Composio's MCP Gateway page states that each team gets its own MCP endpoint (composio.dev/mcp-gateway, checked September 2026), and Zapier advises giving each user their own server and token (docs.zapier.com, checked September 2026). More addresses means more to inventory, rotate and revoke.

### What happens to an Elaichi workspace if the trial ends and nobody pays?

The workspace pauses. Plan-gated features lock and gated routes return a structured error, but nothing is deleted, and subscribing later picks up where it left off. The two plans are Gold and Black, with a 14-day trial. to fall back to. Checkout during a trial sets the paid trial to the remaining days rather than starting a new 14, so it stays one continuous trial.

## Read next

- [Elaichi vs Composio for company-wide MCP access](/blog/elaichi-vs-composio/) — Elaichi vs Composio: one organization-wide MCP endpoint with connectors Elaichi authors, against per-team endpoints over a large third-party app registry.
- [Elaichi vs native AI connectors: one plane, many clients](/blog/elaichi-vs-native-ai-connectors/) — Elaichi vs native AI connectors: what a second AI client costs in repeated authorization, provisioning, audit shapes and role models, and when native is still right.
- [Lunar MCPX alternative: count your servers first](/blog/lunar-mcpx-alternative-governed-access/) — Lunar's MCPX fronts the MCP servers you already run. If you run none, the right Lunar MCPX alternative removes the servers instead of proxying them.