This article covers the questions people ask before subscribing. For tuning questions that come up in use, see the Dify FAQ.
Q: Does the monthly fee include AI costs?
No. This is the most important and most commonly misunderstood point.
NT$1,599 is the hosting fee for the Dify platform. You supply your own API key for whichever language model you connect (OpenAI, Anthropic, and so on), and you pay model usage charges directly to the model provider.
In other words, you have two line items: a fixed monthly hosting fee, plus model costs that vary with usage. The second is proportional to how much you use it — very low while you're testing, and potentially higher than the monthly fee at heavy volume.
Q: Roughly how much are the model costs?
It depends on which model you pick, how much content you send each time, and how many questions come in per day, so there's no single answer.
Two principles will get you started: the more you pack into the knowledge base, the more content goes to the model each time, and the higher the cost; and setting Top-K too high amplifies cost directly. See when your knowledge base grows for how to keep it in check.
Q: Is 2 vCPU / 10 GB enough?
For most applications, yes — and one thing needs clearing up first: model inference does not run on your machine, it runs at OpenAI or Anthropic. Your instance handles orchestration, retrieval, and knowledge base management.
What actually consumes resources is indexing uploaded documents (large PDFs especially) and the number of concurrent conversations. See Dify's resource limits for a detailed way to judge it.
Q: How much data can the knowledge base hold?
For plain text, 10 GB is very generous — text itself takes up almost no space. What usually pushes you toward the limit is loading up lots of scanned PDFs or image files.
One caution, though: fitting isn't the same as belonging. Overstuff a knowledge base and retrieval quality often goes down rather than up, because more irrelevant passages are competing with the right answer.
Q: Can I use the AI applications I build commercially?
Dify is open-source software, and the applications you build on your own instance are yours. What to watch in practice is the terms of use of the model provider you connect to — that's an agreement with OpenAI or Anthropic and has nothing to do with the hosting service.
Q: How does it compare to Coze or Flowise?
Each fits different situations; the main differences are how open the source is, how freely you can deploy, and knowledge base capability. Full comparison in Dify vs Coze vs Flowise.
Q: I just want a support bot. Do I need Dify?
If the answers are all written down in your documents, Dify alone is complete — that's exactly what it's good at.
But if an answer has to be looked up live in another system (order status, inventory, customer records), you also need a tool to do the fetching. See Dify plus n8n for how to split the work.
Conversely, if your requirement is purely rule-based — a keyword comes in, a fixed response goes out, nobody wants to "converse" with it — then n8n is enough and costs far less per month.
Sources and further reading
Dify's features and interface change between versions, so check the official documentation before you start:
- Dify official documentation
- Dify release notes — the authority on feature changes
- Dify source code and issue tracker
Getting started and integration
Q: How long does it take to go from nothing to live?
A support bot that answers from your documents takes roughly 30 to 60 minutes the first time, including connecting the model, writing the prompt, and uploading the knowledge base; see the Dify tutorial for the full steps. The tuning that follows (chunking, retrieval settings) is where the time goes, but that's something you refine gradually after launch.
Q: Can I put the finished bot on my website or LINE?
Your website, yes: once published it has its own URL and embed code, so you can run it as a chat bubble or a full-page embed. Messaging platforms like LINE need an API integration in between (for example, using n8n to receive the LINE webhook and then call the Dify API) — it isn't one click, so factor that work into your evaluation.
Q: How many team members can use it?
You can invite members into the same workspace to edit applications and knowledge bases together, with no per-seat charge. That suits a split where one person builds the application first and colleagues then help maintain the knowledge base content.
Q: Can I try it first?
Yes. Request a free trial on the Free Trial page and our team will set it up for you. No credit card is needed and nothing is charged automatically when the trial ends, and if you test with Gemini's free tier for the model, the whole evaluation period costs close to nothing.
Related articles
- Dify FAQ: API keys, knowledge base tuning, and resource allocation
- What is Dify? An introduction to the no-code AI app development platform
- Dify self-hosted vs managed: a month of real costs, broken down
- RoamerHost Dify hosting plans
Want someone to build it for you?
If you'd rather not assemble these workflows yourself, or the scale is big enough that you want someone planning alongside you, Roamer Tech (RoamerHost's parent company) takes on contract work for business process automation and AI agent development:
