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MLX-VLM Pricing

open sourceopen source · MITlast verified September 6, 2026official site ↗

At a glance

100% free and open source under the MIT license ($0 software cost). Native Apple Silicon Metal-accelerated inference and LoRA fine-tuning engine for Vision-Language Models (Qwen2-VL, PaliGemma, Pixtral, Phi-3-Vision).

Self-hosting cost

MLX-VLM is open source under the MIT license. Self-hosting does not add a software license fee, but you still pay for infrastructure, operations, and any external model or API usage.

Free & cheaper AI Data Tools

same category, free plan or open-source license

Ciliumopen sourceFree and 100% open source under the Apache-2.0 license (with dual GPL-2.0/BSD-2-Clause BPF datapath templates) as a CNCF Graduated project. Cilium has no software licensing fees for self-hosted or cloud Kubernetes deployments (including GKE Dataplane V2 and Azure CNI Powered by Cilium); organizations pay only for their compute infrastructure. For mission-critical enterprise environments, Isovalent Enterprise for Cilium (by Cisco) provides quote-based annual subscriptions (per-node/environment) with 24/7 SLA support, hardened LTS builds, Customer Testing Environments (CuTEs), enterprise BGP/EVPN, and advanced multi-cluster security and observability retention.OrbStackFree for personal and non-commercial use, educational studies, and open-source development. Commercial and business use (or individuals generating >$10,000/year) requires a paid Pro license at $8/user/month billed annually ($96/year) or $10/month monthly, covering up to 5 devices per user with priority support and a 30-day trial. Enterprise plans provide custom volume pricing, centralized billing, MDM/SSO directory integration, and 99.9% uptime SLAs.Rayopen sourceRay is a free and open-source distributed computing framework governed by the PyTorch Foundation under the Apache 2.0 license. It can be self-hosted on any cloud or on-prem cluster with zero licensing costs, while managed execution is available via cloud providers like Anyscale.LLaMA-Factoryopen sourceLLaMA-Factory is 100% free and open-source software under the Apache 2.0 license. It provides a visual WebUI and CLI for fine-tuning over 100 large language models with no subscription or licensing fees (users supply their own compute).
MLX-VLM overview →alternatives →

FAQ

How much does MLX-VLM cost?

100% free and open source under the MIT license ($0 software cost). Native Apple Silicon Metal-accelerated inference and LoRA fine-tuning engine for Vision-Language Models (Qwen2-VL, PaliGemma, Pixtral, Phi-3-Vision).

Does MLX-VLM have a free plan?

Yes — MLX-VLM is open source and free to use.

Can you self-host MLX-VLM for free?

MLX-VLM is open source under the MIT license. Self-hosting does not add a software license fee, but you still pay for infrastructure, operations, and any external model or API usage.

What are free or cheaper MLX-VLM alternatives?

Cilium, OrbStack, Ray are in the same category with a free plan or open-source license.

pricing is editorial catalog data (last verified September 6, 2026) — vendors change plans; confirm on the official site before you buy. Reuse this data under CC-BY 4.0 via /data.