Merlin AI Pro (Unlimited) Plan Reality: $100 Monthly Cap
in progress
K
Kent
Hello. The term "unlimited" in Merlin AI's Pro Plan is misleading, as the plan is subject to a fair use policy. If a user's usage exceeds $16 per day or $100 per month, their account gets suspended for the remainder of that day or month with the warning: "Your account has been paused since you have exceeded fair usage limits for this month. This pause is to ensure the fair usage of our services for all pro users." (https://www.getmerlin.in/terms-and-conditions)
I'm wondering, with the best offer discount to "Get Merlin Pro for just $5 per month," will the maximum usage limits of $16 per day or $100 per month still apply to accounts, or will they be reduced even further? I don't think anyone would want to use a service without clear metrics for credit consumption with AI models and without transparent comparisons showing how it outperforms direct API access. When comparing the original price of $19-29 per month for maximum usage not exceeding $16 per day or $100 per month, it's really NOT worth it compared to other services like Poe and Monica AI.
If we break it down (from $100 per month), does this mean users can't use more than $5 worth of credits daily before their account gets suspended? That level of usage is still far below what would qualify as "Abusive or extreme usage may result in account restriction or termination" as stated in the Pro (Unlimited) plan description.
Let me provide an example: Poe offers approximately 2,906 messages with Claude 3.5 Sonnet for a $20 subscription (1M points) per month.
Although Merlin AI doesn't explicitly publish how many credits are included in the Pro (Unlimited) plan (which is precisely what makes this ambiguous), we can use your previous AppSumo Lifetime plan highest tier as a reference point, which provided 20K credits monthly. With Claude 3.5 Sonnet consuming 25 credits per use (without web access enabled), this equates to roughly 20K/25 = ~800 messages in total. Any reasonable user would clearly see whether subscribing to Poe for $20 or Merlin AI for $19 offers better value.
About your claim that Merlin delivers "$130 worth of value for just $19!" - Where's the evidence (actual data, research, or calculation method) supporting this specific number? You should stop such excessive advertising or create a comparison table similar to what Poe has done on their website with "Direct API Costs vs Poe" to demonstrate actual service superiority, rather than simply claiming your value is based on "All-in-one access to AI" and "20x more messages than ChatGPT."
m
mbaschetti@gmail.com
Where do I see my credits? I have only a display of %. Several days ago I wondered that my account is blocked till 26. April because of fair use. Wihtout any warnings. Where can I buy additional cr4edecreditsits, when I am working at an urgent project?
m
mbaschetti@gmail.com
Where do I see my credits? I have only a display of %. Several days ago I wondered that my account is blocked till 26. April because of fair use. Wihtout any warnings. Where can I buy additional cr4edecreditsits, when I am working at an urgent project?
m
mbaschetti@gmail.com
And I thought I could use Bonkers "Infinity". Now I realized it costs 560 credits
K
Kiên Bùi
I am also a PROD account, and I have just discovered this. I think Merlin needs to be more transparent about this.
V
Vijay Bharadwaj
in progress
Working on an updated pricing page.
N
Nermes
Vijay Bharadwaj This is really bad thing to do. No where ever did it say that our 5$ accounts have lower limits, it say actually PRO accounts but at discouted price. You cant just change this afterwards after you have collected all our money, tricking us into buying whats now false advertisement. Don you see how bad that reflects? Ppl have big acconts on social media and could easily start takling bad about your product and you dont want that. You dont want to be labled as a "scammer" and "scam-product".
What you should do is grandfather those of us that have that 5$ month account and count us as normal limit like the 20$ accounts and all new accounts that create for 5$ should have that new limit.
But what you are doing now is so wrong on many levels. You have totaly tricked us into buying into a product with false advertisement just to get our money tricking us into thinking this is a good deal. Man just dont do that, its better for you in the long run. Just do as I suggested that new accounts of the 5$ have new limits.
V
Vijay Bharadwaj
Hi Kent, I understand your frustration with Merlin Pro's limits being ambiguous. I'll first answer some of your questions:
You asked "I'm wondering, with the best offer discount to "Get Merlin Pro for just $5 per month," will the maximum usage limits of $16 per day or $100 per month still apply to accounts, or will they be reduced even further?"
-> Our T&C says "For accounts with applicable promotional discounts, the monthly usage limit will be around proportionally lower (versus $100), as per the discounted price of that offer." So, it does get reduced for lower price subscriptions.
You said "If we break it down (from $100 per month), does this mean users can't use more than $5 worth of credits daily before their account gets suspended? That level of usage is still far below what would qualify as "Abusive or extreme usage may result in account restriction or termination" as stated in the Pro (Unlimited) plan description."
-> That is, if you work equally everyday. I understand why you may feel that calling a $5 daily usage unfair is a little undeserved. But $5 gets you 100-200 decently-sized Claude queries. In a day. This extended to a month is clearly more than the competitors you quote at a similar price point.
You said "...we can use your previous AppSumo Lifetime plan highest tier as a reference point, which provided 20K credits monthly"
-> AppSumo plans are one-time payment plans and are not even remotely comparable to the Pro plan and the access it provides. In fact, we offer AppSumo users upgrades to Pro for a recurring price and Tier 3 users are the highest takers of the Pro upgrade -- which means Tier 3 users clearly understand what they're getting for that extra money.
You said "Poe offers approximately 2,906 messages with Claude 3.5 Sonnet for a $20 subscription (1M points) per month."
-> According to my calculations, 2906 messages amount to $30 of usage, based on their definition of a message (a total of 1000 tokens). We do $100 per month.
(Continued below)
V
Vijay Bharadwaj
You said "You should stop such excessive advertising or create a comparison table similar to what Poe has done on their website with "Direct API Costs vs Poe" to demonstrate actual service superiority"
-> That's a good idea, but our focus going forward is not just giving people access to different AI models, but rather build meaningful application layer features (like Crafts, Projects, Plugins, Tasks, App Integrations etc). If a product prides itself on giving you more access than the API provider would, then that means they're not adding enough value on top of the AI models, and are merely just an aggregator -- in my personal opinion.
Where's the evidence (actual data, research, or calculation method) supporting this specific number?
-> $130 is the sum total of dollars based on number of subscriptions you can replace, in terms of functionality. You can analyse CSVs and create Artifacts like Claude does, generate great images with high quality models using Bonkers, use features like Tasks and Deep Research (coming soon), use multiple AI models and do amazing search with our Live Search feature. We're clearly replacing a lot of subscriptions here.
Here's what we're going to do -- we're updating our Pricing page to reflect what you get more clearly. It's already in the works for a while, it'll go live soon. However, we can't include comparisons to Poe, since that would be in bad faith, and we don't want to misrepresent them unintentionally.
Hope this helps :) If you have more questions, please feel free to start a conversation at vj@foyer.work
Gabriele Monni
Vijay Bharadwaj so, if I purchased the subscription with a discount you offered, am I subject to different usage limits compared to a standard subscription? Man, that's disappointing and feels quite misleading. You could simply label it 'Pro Lite' or something similar instead of presenting it as a discounted, but ultimately different, product. I'm also not entirely happy with how the Pro subscription is advertised, particularly the 'infinity' query feature, which isn't truly infinite. I realize that offering genuinely unlimited queries might be unfeasible, but greater transparency on this limitation would be appreciated. Otherwise, I'm happy with your product and the constant updates. P.S. I'm also waiting for Gemini Pro 2.5; I heard the APIs are out.
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Vijay Bharadwaj
Gabriele Monni: We're in the process of labelling it as Pro 'mini'. We'll change the "unlimited" phrasing soon. I appreciate your understanding.
The philosophy behind naming it "unlimited" is that the Pro product has no access limits, but only usage limits. You get access to all features, but usage limits HAVE to vary because the product has to sustainable to survive, right?
I understand why that is frustrating, because eventually "usage" and "access" go hand in hand. Can't have one without the other.
And, we considered that it's virtually "unlimited" for "almost" all users (barring a few percentage points) because none of them ever hit limits. So we went ahead with it. We'll change the phrasing soon.
Daniele Mirabella
Vijay Bharadwaj very disappointed to know that a Pro account bought with a discount is, in reality, a limited account compared to a Pro account bought full price. This is not a honest way to sell the product cause nowhere is said to be even more limited when you use a discount code.
V
Vijay Bharadwaj
Daniele Mirabella: We truly understand why you feel so, Daniele. However, it's not really the capabilities of the subscription getting diluted, but rather it's just the fair use threshold that gets modified on the $5/month plan. Here are some considerations:
- This keeps the business sustainably running, and our users get to enjoy the value of our exclusive features for as long as they want. Merlin is not just a money-making machine that'll soon disappear once it's done making money -- it wants to be a helpful utility for ages to come. We're (as humans) in a transition phase where usage is skyrocketing but costs are not coming down proportionally. Therefore, usage is subject to limits to keep the business running healthily.
- There are two aspects to "limits": one is usage amount and the other is feature access. The $5 plan has no feature access limits in comparison to the $20 plan. We do not have any intention of being simply an AI model aggregator, and we intend on adding value through features, not just giving away more usage. Having the same access to features as a full Pro is actually valuable.
- The usage you get with the $5 plan is equivalent/very similar to a lot of other actual $20 subscriptions. You get 1,600 - 2,000 decently large responses per month using GPT 4o. That is at least 72 large (4-5 paragraphs per response) GPT-4o responses per working day, given you work each day equally. That is tremendous value for $5.
However, I understand why you feel the marketing is "dishonest". All I can do is to improve this for the times going forward, and hope you can understand. If you have more queries, please feel free to start a conversation at vj@foyer.work!
a
alex m.
Vijay Bharadwaj you are trying to justify a misleading marketing. You said you'd get "PRO" and then you are selling a different product. That is Misleading, if you advertise the PRO, you need to offer the PRO. Also, i don't have a way to see how many credits i have left or my usage which is ridiculous
N
Nermes
Vijay Bharadwaj This is really bad thing to do. No where ever did it say that our 5$ accounts have lower limits, it say actually PRO accounts but at discouted price. You cant just change this afterwards after you have collected all our money, tricking us into buying whats now false advertisement. Don you see how bad that reflects? Ppl have big acconts on social media and could easily start takling bad about your product and you dont want that. You dont want to be labled as a "scammer" and "scam-product".
What you should do is grandfather those of us that have that 5$ month account and count us as normal limit like the 20$ accounts and all new accounts that create for 5$ should have that new limit.
But what you are doing now is so wrong on many levels. You have totaly tricked us into buying into a product with false advertisement just to get our money tricking us into thinking this is a good deal. Man just dont do that, its better for you in the long run. Just do as I suggested that new accounts of the 5$ have new limits.
Beeble
I wholeheartedly agree with this. It's not enough to tell customers after the fact that a falsely labelled, falsely advertised plan is the same as the core 'unlimited' product. Merlin knew full well this wasn't the same product, and there was no visible information about the difference at all.
We have paid for a product explicitly marketed as being a discount on the unlimited plan. I'm not really sure whether Merlin is based in India or USA, given the URL. Seems to be USA, but it breaks consumer law in both countries, easily backed up by 5 mins of research.
I don't believe this was a mistake, Merlin's apologies are superficial, they haven't corrected it anywhere it is advertised (still the same wording and description), and at this point I'll be reporting it any way I can. Merlin has taken money under pretences and with false advertising.
We should indeed be grandfathered into the true unlimited plan.