How to get the best deals on Rivet — pricing breakdown, savings tips, and alternatives
Rivet offers a free tier — you might not need to pay at all!
Perfect for trying out Rivet without spending anything
💡 Pro tip: Start with the free tier to test if Rivet fits your workflow before upgrading to a paid plan.
Don't overpay for features you won't use. Here's our recommendation based on your use case:
Most AI tools, including many in the ai agent builders category, offer special pricing for students, teachers, and educational institutions. These discounts typically range from 20-50% off regular pricing.
• Students: Verify your student status with a .edu email or Student ID
• Teachers: Faculty and staff often qualify for education pricing
• Institutions: Schools can request volume discounts for classroom use
Most SaaS and AI tools tend to offer their best deals around these windows. While we can't guarantee Rivet runs promotions during all of these, they're worth watching:
The biggest discount window across the SaaS industry — many tools offer their best annual deals here
Holiday promotions and year-end deals are common as companies push to close out Q4
Tools targeting students and educators often run promotions during this window
Signing up for Rivet's email list is the best way to catch promotions as they happen
💡 Pro tip: If you're not in a rush, Black Friday and end-of-year tend to be the safest bets for SaaS discounts across the board.
Test features before committing to paid plans
Save 10-30% compared to monthly payments
Many companies reimburse productivity tools
Some providers offer multi-tool packages
Wait for Black Friday or year-end sales
Some tools offer "win-back" discounts to returning users
If Rivet's pricing doesn't fit your budget, consider these ai agent builders alternatives:
Open-source no-code AI workflow builder and visual LLM application platform with drag-and-drop interface. Build chatbots, RAG systems, and AI agents using LangChain components, supporting 100+ integrations.
Free tier available
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Open-source low-code visual builder for creating AI agents, RAG applications, and MCP servers using a drag-and-drop interface with Python-native custom components.
Free tier available
✓ Free plan available
Dify is an open-source platform for building AI applications that combines visual workflow design, model management, and knowledge base integration in one tool.
Free tier available
✓ Free plan available
Yes, Rivet is completely free and open-source under the MIT license, with no paid tiers, seat-based fees, or usage-based billing from Ironclad itself. You only pay the underlying LLM provider (OpenAI, Anthropic, etc.) for API calls your graphs make. The desktop application can be downloaded directly from the Rivet website or GitHub, and the full source code is available for inspection, forking, and self-hosting. This pricing model is unusual in our directory — most visual AI development tools charge $20–$100+ per seat monthly.
Rivet was built by Ironclad, the leading digital contracting platform used by legal teams for contract review and obligation tracking. It originated as an internal tool when Ironclad's engineers struggled to build AI agents programmatically in code. Rivet is actively used in production at Ironclad itself, and publicly endorsed by CTOs and executives at Attentive, Bento, and AssemblyAI. Todd Berman (CTO) calls it 'the best tool out there' for collaborative prompt chain development, and Bento has used it to ship AI-powered product experiences.
LangChain is a code-first Python/JS framework with no native visual editor, while Flowise is a browser-based visual LangChain wrapper typically self-hosted as a web app. Rivet differs by being a desktop application whose graphs compile to YAML files that live in your Git repository, enabling standard pull-request reviews. Compared to the other visual AI development tools in our directory, Rivet's strengths are its remote debugger, code-review-friendly file format, and zero cost. LangChain has a larger ecosystem; Rivet has tighter collaboration ergonomics for engineering teams.
Rivet supports the major commercial LLM providers including OpenAI (GPT-4, GPT-3.5), Anthropic (Claude models), and integrations with tools like AssemblyAI for audio transcription and understanding. Because graphs are configurable nodes, new provider support can be added via the plugin system — AssemblyAI's integration is a publicly cited example of a third-party extending the Rivet ecosystem. Self-hosted and local models can also be wired in via custom nodes. Check the official documentation for the current full provider list as new integrations ship regularly.
Yes — this is the core deployment model. You design and iterate on prompt graphs in the Rivet desktop IDE, then execute them inside your own application using Rivet's TypeScript/Node.js SDK. The remote executor lets you observe live graph execution from the Rivet desktop app while your production application runs the graph, which is how teams debug real user traffic. Graphs are just YAML files checked into your repo, so deployment is essentially shipping a config file plus the SDK dependency. This architecture avoids vendor lock-in to a hosted runtime.
Start with the free tier and upgrade when you need more features
Get Started with Rivet →Pricing and discounts last verified March 2026