Watchflows 1.55 changes what you get for your money. If you own the app, you get more. If you were reading the pricing page, it gets shorter. This post says what changed, why, and what it means for each kind of customer.
What changed
Before 1.55 there were three ways to pay for Cloud. Cloud Standard at $12 a month, Cloud Pro at $20, and a $5 Owner Bundle that added hosted AI and the relay to a license you had already bought. Owners also had a 7-day trial of hosted AI, metered at 400 Sparks a day. The public webhook relay needed one of those plans.
Now:
- One Cloud plan. Watchflows Cloud is $12 a month or $132 a year, which is one month free. It includes the app while you subscribe, 6,000 Sparks of Watchflows AI a month, the premium models such as Claude Opus and GPT-5.5, and public webhooks.
- The relay is part of the license. If you paid $49 for Watchflows, hooks.watchflows.app is yours. A GitHub push, a Stripe event or a form submission can reach the Public Webhook trigger on your Mac with no plan and no port forwarding.
- Spark packs need no subscription. 5,500 Sparks for $5, 12,000 for $10, 32,500 for $25. They never expire. Buy one when you want our AI for a while, and buy nothing when you do not.
- 2,000 free Sparks for anyone. Trying Watchflows AI takes an email and a sign-in link, no card. The free Sparks are good for 30 days, once per person and once per Mac. If you own a license there is no email step at all: your key is your account.
Cloud Pro and the Owner Bundle are no longer offered. If you have one, it keeps working exactly as it does today until you change it.
Why
The old pricing page was a matrix. Three plans, a trial with a daily meter, and a bundle that only made sense once you knew what the other two were. People wrote to ask which one they needed. Most of them needed none of it.
Two things were wrong with the matrix, and the matrix was a symptom of both.
The first is that the relay was sold as a Cloud feature when it is really an app feature. A webhook trigger that cannot be reached from the internet is half a trigger. Asking someone who paid for the app to pay $5 a month for the other half was the kind of thing that looks fine on a spreadsheet and bad in an email from a customer. So it moved into the license, where the Webhook node always belonged.
The second is that hosted AI was priced like a membership when most people use it like a utility. You build a few flows with the Flow Builder, you run some AI steps, and then for a month you do not. A monthly plan fits the person who runs AI steps every day. A pack fits everyone else. Both now exist, and neither one is required to use the app.
The result is one sentence per customer, which is what a pricing page should be. Try it free. Own it for $49 and bring your own AI, with packs if you want ours. Or subscribe for $12 and get the app, our AI and the relay in one line.
If you own the app
Nothing to turn on. Open Settings then Webhooks and the relay is there; the Public Webhook trigger gives any flow a stable HTTPS URL.
To try Watchflows AI, open Settings then Cloud and click Try it. 2,000 free Sparks land on your license, with no email to confirm.
An AI step spends about a Spark; building a flow with the Flow Builder spends a couple of hundred. When they are used up, your flows keep running and only the steps that use Watchflows AI pause. Buy a pack, subscribe, or point those steps at your own provider.
Your own keys and local models work the way they always did. They take priority over Watchflows AI whenever both are configured, and they never spend a Spark.
If you used the old 7-day owner trial, that was your free taste. The packs are the next step, and Settings says so if you look.
If you subscribe to Cloud
6,000 Sparks arrive each month. Whatever you have left rides along for 30 more days before it expires, so a quiet month is not a wasted one. Packs stack on top and are spent last. Your prompts go from your Mac to the model directly; what our server sees is a request for a spend-capped key, never the prompt. The details are in What Transits Our Servers.
If the subscription lapses and you do not own a license, the app pauses automation until you subscribe again or buy a license. Your flows, canvas and data stay where they are, on your Mac.
If you are on Cloud Pro or the Owner Bundle
Nothing changes until you change it. Your plan renews at the same price with the same Sparks. If you cancel, the Owner Bundle's relay does not go away, because the relay is now part of your license anyway. Pro subscribers who want more Sparks than the $12 plan carries can add a pack whenever they need it.
Current numbers always live at watchflows.app/pricing, and the whole model is written up in Watchflows Cloud.