Which Photon plan should I start on — and what signal tells me to move up?

November 12, 2026 · 5 min read

SentX SI

The short answer for Photon, SentX SI's AI coding agent, is to start with the one-time free trial, then begin on the smallest paid plan your actual weekly workload fits — for most people that is Plus, at USD 20 a month. The trial is not just a courtesy; it is a calibration run. The plan tiers are defined relative to Plus rather than in absolute numbers, so the only way to know which multiplier is yours is to watch what your own work costs in practice before you commit to a price.

Source: Photon AI Coding Agent — Describe It, Get It Built

The trap to avoid is thinking in months. Billing is monthly, but usage resets every week, so Pro is not ten times the work of Plus per month — it is ten times the work per week, every week. The question is never how much you build in a month. It is what a normal week looks like, and what a busy one looks like.

Source: Photon AI Coding Agent — Describe It, Get It Built

Here is the tier map, from the Photon reference page updated November 11, 2026, all prices in US dollars and billed monthly. Plus gives you the Standard Photon model, standard weekly usage, 25 GB of project storage, and an automatic site address on sentx.site. Pro raises the model to the Pro tier, moves usage to 10x Plus, and doubles storage to 50 GB, with the address still automatic. Ultra keeps the Pro model, pushes usage to 20x or 50x Plus at two price points, USD 200 and USD 500, doubles storage again to 100 GB, adds the max thinking mode, and is the only tier where you choose your own site name. None of the tiers require you to code; you describe the result in plain language, and developers can go further with team instructions, a connected server, and file-level access.

Source: Photon AI Coding Agent — Describe It, Get It Built

The method I would use goes like this. Spend the trial on a representative week of your real work, not on your biggest idea. Ask Photon for what is actually in front of you — a small site, a document pack, a game prototype — and notice which request, or how far into one, runs the trial out. That tells you the scale of a burst of work. Then estimate a normal week: how many build requests, how many revision rounds, how many heavier media or document jobs. Compare that against the tiers as multiples of Plus. If a normal week fits inside the standard allowance, Plus is your home. If your rhythm is closer to ten times that — a standing client relationship where weeks regularly carry a full build plus fixes — Pro is where the math lands. Ultra is for weeks that run at 20x or 50x, and for two Ultra-only things: the max thinking mode and a site name of your choosing.

Source: Photon AI Coding Agent — Describe It, Get It Built

To make that concrete, one illustration — a scenario, not a measurement of any real account. A consultant has two small client sites a month plus a handful of reports. They spend the trial on one landing page and two rounds of revisions, and the trial carries that comfortably, running out somewhere around the middle of an average working week. Two client sites a month means some weeks carry a build burst and others are quiet, so the consultant's normal week is a few requests. That profile is Plus: standard usage, the Standard model, 25 GB. Now suppose the same consultant takes on a recurring dashboard — a build most weeks, with fixes in the same weeks the build lands. Bursts start stacking, and the weekly limit starts landing mid-workday. That is the signal, and it arrives within a few weeks, not at the end of a billing cycle.

Source: Photon AI Coding Agent — Describe It, Get It Built

The move-up signals, one by one. The cleanest is hitting the weekly usage limit in a normal week. The reference page is explicit that work continues past the limit, paid from your wallet balance, or after the weekly reset — so an overage is a meter, not a wall. One overage week can be a busy week. Two or three in a row, in weeks that are just your normal rhythm, is a plan that is too small, and the wallet drain is the cost of finding that out a week at a time. The second signal is storage, which moves on a different axis: projects live in 25 GB on Plus, 50 on Pro, 100 on Ultra. Image-heavy or video-heavy work pressures storage before it pressures usage, so a storage step-up can be the reason to move even when the weekly limit never bites. The third is the model tier itself. Plus runs the Standard Photon model; Pro and Ultra run the Pro model. If the work you hand off needs the Pro model, that is a move to Pro or above regardless of how light your volume is — capability and volume are separate questions, and the plan choice should answer both. The fourth is the two Ultra-only features: max thinking mode, and publishing under a site name you choose instead of an automatic one. A client who wants their site at a name they picked on sentx.site is an Ultra need, however small the volume.

Source: Photon AI Coding Agent — Describe It, Get It Built

One ceiling no plan lifts: an account can publish up to 25 sites, each up to 3,000 files and 200 MB. If your real workload is a large multi-site portfolio, that account-level limit is the constraint to watch, and it sits the same on every tier.

Source: Photon AI Coding Agent — Describe It, Get It Built

And one boundary that is identical on every tier, worth knowing before you pick: SentX's privacy policy states that submissions are not confidential and may enter training or shared memory. So whatever plan you start on, client data, credentials, and anything you could not afford to share stay out of the brief. The tier changes how much you can build; it does not change what the brief can hold.

Source: Privacy Policy | SentX SI (sentx.ai)

The method in one line: use the one-time trial to see your own volume, start on the smallest paid plan a normal week fits — usually Plus — and move up only when a signal lands. A recurring weekly limit in ordinary weeks, storage pressure, a need for the Pro model, the max thinking mode, or a chosen site name. Under-provisioning with a clear upgrade path is cheaper to fix than over-provisioning, and the weekly reset means you will know which one you are in fast.

Source: Photon AI Coding Agent — Describe It, Get It Built