A free tier that's genuinely useful, and two paid tiers for people who want Brief doing more of the work.
The catch-and-review core, on your own devices.
On-device filtering uses Apple Intelligence on your own hardware. It's private and free to run, and it's a little less precise than the cloud model.
Pro features, your tokens.
You paste an API key from Anthropic (or another supported provider) in Settings, and Brief uses it for filtering. You pay that provider directly for what you use — typically a few dollars a month — which is why this tier costs less than Pro. No key, no cloud filtering: Brief falls back to on-device rather than quietly using ours.
Better catching, the full morning brief, and up to 500 items a month.
Cloud filtering is the single biggest quality jump, and it's what catches the awkward ones, like a task buried mid-thread in a group chat. New subscribers get their first month of Premium free; founding members get 50% off their first year with their invite code.
Unlimited catching, plus the daily Brief Plus modules.
Your first month free when you subscribe
If you're testing Brief during the beta, you're a founding member.
You'll get plenty of notice, and an explicit choice. Nothing switches to a paid plan on its own.
It depends on the plan, because the two limits count different things. Free counts items you action — route or approve into Reminders, Calendar, or Brief. Catching is unlimited, and anything you dismiss or leave sitting in the queue doesn't count toward the 100. Pro counts items Brief surfaces for review — the ones that reach your queue, whatever you do with them next — up to 500 a month, roughly 16 a day. Messages Brief reads and filters out never count on either plan. Bring Your Own Key and Premium have no cap at all.
On-device runs on your Mac's own hardware — private and free, but it misses more of the hard cases: a task buried mid-thread, or something phrased indirectly. Cloud filtering sends candidate messages to a stronger model and catches noticeably more. Free is on-device; Pro and Premium use the cloud model.
Yes. If you'd rather run on your own Anthropic or OpenAI key, you can — it's stored only in your Mac's Keychain and used from your Mac.
Not at launch. If enough people want one we'll add it — tell us at [email protected].
Install both apps and see whether it catches what you'd have missed.