Astrolium has four tiers, and which one you should be on this month depends less on how professional you feel and more on three numbers: how many clients you actually track, how often you reach for synastry or returns, and how much of your interpretation drafting time the AI can credibly recover. I have spent stretches on every tier — Free for the first six weeks of last year, Pro through summer, Adept since autumn, and a one-month detour through Master while building out a small team. What follows is the math at each step. Current numbers and the BYOK toggle live on the pricing page, and the features index covers what each tier opens.
The point of this post is not to push you up the ladder. There are practitioners I know who should stay on Free indefinitely, and one teacher I introduced to Astrolium who has been happily on Pro at $11 for eight months because synastry is not part of her work. The right tier is the one whose cap you bump into more than twice a month. Below that, you are paying for headroom you do not use.
What Free actually gets you
Five client profiles is more generous than it sounds for somebody not yet billing for sessions. Each profile carries the natal chart, the chart graphic, the position tables, the aspect grid, and any session notes you type. The Swiss Ephemeris engine that powers Master also powers Free — there is no degraded-precision mode for non-paying users. You also get six popular house systems (Placidus, Whole Sign, Equal, Koch, Porphyry, Regiomontanus), all 12 signs and the standard ten planets plus nodes and Chiron, and Solar Fire .SFCHT import for migrating an existing library.
What Free does not get is transits, secondary progressions, the AI assistant, branded PDF export, the remaining 17 of 23 house systems, or any of the relational charts. It is a natal-chart workspace. Drag in your birth data, run the chart, take notes. If your work fits that shape, Free is the right product. Many self-study astrologers and early-career practitioners stay here for nine months or longer.
The 5-slot cap is on saved profiles, not on chart computations. You can run an unlimited number of one-off natal charts for friends, students, or research without ever using a slot. Delete a profile and the slot frees up. The cap bites only when you want to track somebody over time and need their notes and transit history persisted.
Pro at $11: the first paid step
Pro turns the static natal workspace into a working time-aware tool. The two features that justify the upgrade are transits and secondary progressions — neither of which Free includes. You also pick up the AI assistant at 50 calls per month, branded PDF export at 10 per month (with your name and small mark, not yet white-label), and the client cap moves from 5 to 25. All 23 house systems unlock.
The relevant question at $11 is not "is the AI good." It is "do I need transits, and what is my PDF count per month." If you ship a chart to a client and never look at it again, Free covers you. If you write a follow-up note three months later about how Saturn moving over their natal Sun lines up with what they described, you needed transits. There is no workaround on Free — the timeline scrubber is the Pro feature. Saturn does not move retroactively because you did not pay.
The PDF cap of 10 per month is where most early-career practitioners feel Pro. Two PDFs per first-time client (one chart, one summary), 1 per follow-up, and 10 starts to feel small once you have three or four paying clients on regular cadence. The math: if your billing rate is $80 per session and Pro buys you back forty minutes of prep per session via the AI plus the time you save not maintaining a separate transit lookup tool, Pro pays for itself in roughly half a session.
The honest case for Pro is the smallest one. You are doing astrology in time, not just astrology in chart, and you have somewhere between three and twenty regular clients. If you have not yet hit either of those thresholds, stay on Free. If you have, $11 is the smallest commitment that gives you the right tools.
Adept at $29: the consultation workhorse
Adept is where the chart suite gets serious. Synastry, composite, Davison, solar return, lunar return, solar arc directions, secondary progressions in their fuller form — all four of the relational and predictive timing chart types that take a practitioner from "I read your natal" to "I work with you across time and across relationships." Knowledge Base unlocks (5 PDFs, 100MB) so the AI can cite your own training library instead of just its general grounding. Transit Scanner appears, which is the feature that quietly justifies Adept in most working practices.
Transit Scanner lets you ask "show me every client with Saturn opposite their natal Sun this month" and get back a short list. The first time I used it in production, I caught a synastry crisis brewing between two clients I would otherwise have missed for at least another two weeks. The scanner replaces the manual workflow of clicking through twenty profiles every Sunday evening, and at twenty profiles it pays for the tier in time alone before any other feature.
The AI quota climbs from 50 to 300 calls per month, and BYOK unlocks. If you already have an OpenAI or Anthropic account from your own subscription, you can connect that key in settings and the calls route through your account at provider rates with unlimited usage on our side. Your invoice drops by $5 per month for the privilege of paying the AI vendor directly. Most power users I know on Adept run BYOK because they bumped against the 300-call cap once and decided they wanted the ceiling out of the picture.
The volume signal for Adept is straightforward. The moment you start doing synastry, composite, or solar return work — those are Adept features, full stop. Same for batch operations: if you find yourself manually checking "who has the same transit this month" more than twice, the scanner has paid for itself. PDF cap goes from 10 to 100 per month, which is the threshold at which a full-time solo practitioner stops counting.
Master at $79: studio and brand
Master is built for studios, mentors, and astrologers who have outgrown the single-practitioner shape. Three team seats so colleagues share one workspace. White-label PDF replaces the small Astrolium mark with your logo and your fonts. Transit Alerts push to your phone or email when configured transits go exact across your roster — proactive outreach instead of weekly review. The Weekly Digest emails you a Monday brief covering every client with something significant happening that week, which is the closest thing astrology has to a CRM notification system. The PDF cap moves from 100 to 1,000, AI calls from 300 to 1,500 (or unlimited with BYOK), Knowledge Base goes from 5 PDFs to unlimited up to 5GB, and shareable links go from 20 per month to unlimited.
Two features inside Master are quietly the strongest arguments for it. Multi-language report exports let you generate the same PDF in 5 languages (English, Russian, Spanish, Portuguese, German) with a single button — useful for any practitioner with cross-border clientele, which in 2026 is most of us. And Astrocartography (V1.1 module, early access for Master) gives you relocation maps without subscribing to a separate $60-to-$100 tool.
The volume signal for Master is the team seat. If at least one other person reads charts under your practice name — a junior astrologer, a mentee, a co-host on the YouTube channel — Master is the right tier. The seats, the shared knowledge base, and the unified roster mean nobody is exporting and re-importing CSVs to keep two workspaces in sync. If you are a solo practitioner without team needs but want the white-label and the alerts, Master can still be the right answer, but the seat math does not add up the same way.
Feature matrix
| Feature | Free | Pro — $11 | Adept — $29 | Master — $79 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Client profiles | 5 | 25 | 100 | Unlimited |
| House systems | 6 | 23 | 23 | 23 |
| Transits / progressions | — | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| AI assistant calls / mo | — | 50 | 300 | 1,500 |
| Branded PDF export / mo | — | 10 | 100 | 1,000 |
| Synastry + composite | — | — | ✓ | ✓ |
| Solar / lunar returns | — | — | ✓ | ✓ |
| Transit Scanner | — | — | ✓ | ✓ |
| BYOK (bring your own key) | — | — | ✓ | ✓ |
| White-label PDF | — | — | — | ✓ |
| Team seats | 1 | 1 | 1 | 3 |
| Transit Alerts + Weekly Digest | — | — | — | ✓ |
| Multi-language report export | — | — | — | ✓ (5 languages) |
Volume thresholds, concretely
Here is the version I use when newer practitioners ask me. Run the tier you are on for 30 days. Count three things: how many times you hit the client cap, how many PDFs you exported to paying clients, and how many hours you spent on prep work the AI could plausibly have started for you. The cap signal is the dominant one — once you bump against it twice in a single month, the upgrade has already happened in your head.
Zero to two paying clients a month. Stay on Free. The 5-slot cap will not bind. You do not yet need transits as a feature; you can compute a transit chart on Free, you just cannot scrub it across time. Once you start being asked "what is happening for me this autumn," that is the Pro signal.
Three to ten paying clients a month, mostly natal and transit work. Pro at $11 is built for you. Twenty-five clients is plenty of headroom, the AI at 50 calls covers about three first-time session preps a week, and the 10 branded PDFs per month is the right cap for a practice that is not yet shipping a deliverable on every session.
Five-plus clients where synastry, composite, or returns come up regularly. Adept at $29. The chart suite is the dividing line. If you are charging for "what does the next year look like" sessions, you need solar returns; if you are charging for relationship readings, you need synastry and composite. Both are Adept features. The Transit Scanner alone pays for the tier once you have a roster of twenty active clients.
Studio of two-plus astrologers, or a single practitioner with strong brand needs. Master at $79. The team seat is the deciding feature. If you are solo and your only needs are white-label and the alerts, sit on Adept and add BYOK to keep the AI unlimited — your monthly all-in lands around $24 and you keep the headroom for an upgrade later.
A note on BYOK
BYOK unlocks at Adept. If you already pay OpenAI or Anthropic for ChatGPT Plus or Claude Pro, plugging your API key into Astrolium routes the chart-grounded prompts through your account. You pay the provider for the actual tokens (typically a few dollars per month at the rate the assistant actually fires), Astrolium discounts your invoice by five dollars, and the in-app cap disappears. For practitioners who genuinely live in the AI assistant — drafting interpretation briefs, running structured Q&A against the Knowledge Base — BYOK is the cleanest path to "the AI never gets in the way."
For practitioners who use the AI casually, the included quotas at each tier are sufficient and BYOK is not worth the configuration step. Adept's 300 calls per month covers about four first-time sessions and twelve follow-ups; Master's 1,500 covers a fully booked solo practice with room to spare.
What I would have done differently
I stayed on Free for 6 weeks longer than I should have. The reason was not the price, it was the friction of switching billing on a card I share with my partner. By week four I had hit the 5-client cap twice, exported and re-imported the same client's natal chart three times, and wished I could scrub a transit chart instead of computing a static one. Looking back, the friction in those six weeks was worth roughly $1,400 at my then-billing rate, against a $16.50 cost to be on Pro for those weeks. Free is great when it fits. When you start working around it, the upgrade has already happened in your head — the only thing left is the credit card.
The clearest signal that it is time to step up is repetition. The same workaround, the same export-and-delete cycle, the same hand-written transit lookup, three weeks in a row. That is your unconscious telling you what the next tier is for. Pay it. Use the recovered attention on actual chart work.
If you are coming from another tool, the upgrade math gets even simpler — see migrating from Solar Fire to Astrolium for the import walkthrough, or the comparison hub for the broader picture against every major competitor.
