Dagon SSH pricing: what is free, what is Premium, and how bring your own key works
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Version 2.2.23 of Dagon SSH changes how the app pays for AI. Until now every Premium account had the same daily cap on AI calls, and the calls ran on my servers. That still works, but it is no longer the only option: you can bring your own OpenAI key, buy a one-time Lifetime plan, or top up the monthly allowance when you run out.
Below is what each plan gets. All of it.
Why AI needed its own rules
A terminal session costs me roughly nothing per user. AI does not. Every command suggestion, every analysis, every dictated sentence and every narrated event is a paid model call, on my own hardware or on OpenAI when the home box is busy.
A flat daily cap treated a short systemctl question the same as a long agent session with screens of logs attached. So the server now prices each call by what it actually costs and counts that against a monthly allowance. You see a percentage. Not dollars.
Free, after the trial
Every new account gets 60 days with every Premium feature unlocked, no card. When the trial ends without a subscription, the app drops to the free plan. Nothing gets deleted; anything above the free limits is greyed out with a lock and comes back the moment you subscribe.
The free plan keeps:
- the full SSH terminal, including tmux and mosh
- one active server (the oldest one; you can still add more, they just stay inactive)
- 10 snippets and one toolbar
- the command palette and SSH keys with biometric lock
- themes and the local backup
- the SFTP browser in read-only mode, so you can open folders and preview files
Locked on the free plan: AI and voice, Git, Docker and PM2, server and GPU monitoring, port forwarding, split panes, and SFTP writes (upload, download, editing, rename, delete).
Premium: $2.99 a month or $29.99 a year
Premium unlocks all of that, and the server, snippet and toolbar caps go away. It also comes with a monthly AI allowance that pays for AI on my servers. The bar in the Premium tab shows how much of the current month you have used and when it renews.
A few rules worth knowing:
- The allowance resets on the first of each calendar month. Unused parts do not carry over.
- The yearly plan gets the same allowance per month as the monthly one. Paying for a year does not give you twelve months of AI to spend in one week.
- In the month you subscribe, the counter starts from zero. What you used during the trial is not charged against it.
- The trial has its own allowance for the whole 60 days, not per month.
Top-up packs
If you are subscribed and the month runs out early, you can buy a pack. There are three, at $2, $5 and $10 in Google Play. In allowance terms, the $2 pack adds about two thirds of a normal month, the $5 one about one and two thirds, the $10 one a little over three months.
Pack balance does not expire. It sits in a separate pool, and in Settings › Other › AI source and your own key you pick "Monthly limit" or "AI packs", and the app spends only from the one you picked. When the selected pool is empty you get a sheet with your options (switch pools, buy a pack, add your own key) instead of a silent fallback.
Packs are for subscribers only. Nobody else can buy them, Lifetime included.
Bring your own OpenAI key
On the same screen there is a third source, "My key". Paste an OpenAI API key, tap "Check and save", and from then on AI and voice go from your phone straight to api.openai.com. My servers are not in that path at all.
What the key covers:
- AI command, analyze and the chat agent
- dictation, with
gpt-4o-mini-transcribeby default - voice notes: transcription and the summary happen with your key, so the audio never leaves the phone and only the text is saved to your notes
- reading text aloud and the narrator, on OpenAI
tts-1
You pick the chat model yourself, from GPT-5.2 down to GPT-4o mini, plus o3 and o4-mini. The app shows the price per million tokens next to each one and keeps a local monthly tally of requests, tokens, audio minutes and an estimated cost. The real bill is on platform.openai.com.
The key lives only in Android secure storage on the phone. It is not synced, not included in the JSON backup, not sent to my server, and the UI shows it as sk-…abcd. If terminal output you send to the AI happens to contain an OpenAI key, the app masks it before sending.
A wrong key or an account out of credit gives you a clear error with a button to the AI settings. The app never switches back to my servers behind your back.
Who can use their own key: subscribers (as an option next to the allowance and packs), trial accounts, and Lifetime. On the free plan AI stays locked, key or no key.
Lifetime: $99.99 once
Lifetime is a single purchase that unlocks every Premium feature for good, with no renewal and nothing to cancel. The catch is that it is a bring-your-own-key plan: Lifetime has no AI allowance and cannot buy packs. AI and voice on a Lifetime account run only on your OpenAI key. Without one, tapping an AI feature asks you to add a key instead of showing the paywall.
It makes sense if you want the tools (SFTP, Git, Docker, monitoring, port forwarding, split panes) without a subscription, and either already pay OpenAI or barely use AI.
The small print
- A purchase belongs to the account that verified it. The same subscription or Lifetime cannot be activated on a second account. A subscription moves to a new account only if the old one was deleted.
- Purchases restore on their own when the app starts and after you sign in. There is no "restore purchases" button because Google Play does not need one; cancelling is in Google Play › Subscriptions.
- If a pack is refunded, its value is taken off your balance. A refunded Lifetime is removed.
- Deleting your account does not reset the trial or the month's usage. Unused pack balance is lost with the account.
Where to get it
Version 2.2.23 is on Google Play. The core terminal stays free. New accounts get 60 days of Premium, and after that you can mix the allowance with your own key however you like.
If a plan rule here feels unfair, or the allowance runs out faster than you expected, write to <a href="mailto:contact@alpaco.it">contact@alpaco.it</a>. Those reports are what I look at when the per-call prices get adjusted.