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MergeWatch SaaS uses a prepaid credits model. After a free tier, you load a balance with a card (via Stripe), and each review deducts its actual cost from that balance. No subscriptions, no per-seat fees, no volume contracts.

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Free tier

Every installation gets 5 free PR reviews total (lifetime, not per month). No credit card is required to start. The free counter is tracked per GitHub App installation — once you’ve used all 5, you’ll need to add a payment method to continue.
The free tier is intended to let you evaluate MergeWatch on real PRs. If you reach the limit and want to keep going, add a card via Dashboard → Billing.

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Open-source maintainers

MergeWatch offers free frontier-model review to open-source maintainers, beyond the standard free tier above. If you maintain an open-source project, you can apply rather than paying per review.

Apply for free open-source review

Applications are reviewed individually — tell us about the project and how you’d use MergeWatch.

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How an approved grant behaves

Once a project is approved, reviews on the covered repositories are sponsored: no charge, and they don’t consume your free reviews or credit balance. Your Dashboard → Billing page shows an Open Source Program panel with the covered repositories, what’s been sponsored this month, and your fair-use headroom. Specifics worth knowing:
  • Only the repositories named in the grant are covered. Approval is per project, not per organization — other repositories in the same installation bill normally. Ask us to add a repository and we will.
  • Coverage requires the repository to be public at review time. If a covered repository is made private, its next review is billed normally rather than sponsored.
  • Renaming or transferring a covered repository is safe. Grants track the repository itself, not its name.
  • Fair use is a monthly ceiling, shared across the repositories in your grant. Going over it doesn’t block anything — reviews simply fall back to your free tier and balance for the rest of the month.
  • Grants are time-limited and renewed on request. When one expires, reviews fall back to the standard free tier and balance — they are never cut off outright.
If a grant lapses or a project outgrows the fair-use limit, MergeWatch will say so on the pull request and point you at renewal or at self-hosting, which is free and unlimited. You will not be asked for a card. Self-hosting is always free regardless, and remains the right choice if you would rather run the whole pipeline yourself. See Self-hosted is always free.

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Per-review pricing

Each review is priced transparently from the actual LLM cost. There are no tiers or commitments.
Example. A review that costs $0.02 in LLM tokens:
A typical small-to-medium PR review lands between 0.01and0.01 and 0.10, depending on diff size, number of agents enabled, and whether codebase-awareness triggers file fetches.
The minimum balance required to start a paid review is $0.05. If your balance drops below that, MergeWatch pauses reviews until you top up or auto-reload fires.

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Topping up

Add credits from Dashboard → Billing:
  1. Click Add payment method → complete Stripe Checkout to save a card.
  2. Pick a top-up amount: 10∗∗,∗∗10**, **25, 50∗∗,or∗∗50**, or **100.
  3. Credits post instantly. The balance appears in the dashboard header.

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Auto-reload

Enable auto-reload to avoid interruptions. When your balance drops below the configured threshold (default $1), MergeWatch charges your saved card for the configured top-up amount. Configure it in Dashboard → Billing → Auto-reload:
  • Toggle auto-reload on/off
  • Set the threshold (e.g., $5)
  • Set the top-up amount (e.g., $25)
Auto-reload uses a DynamoDB mutex to guarantee it fires at most once per drop below the threshold — you won’t see double charges on rapid back-to-back reviews.

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What counts as a billable review

A billable review is any review that completes and posts a comment. Specifically:
  • Each pull_request event (opened, synchronize, ready_for_review) that runs to completion counts as one review.
  • PRs skipped by a skip rule in your .mergewatch.yml (draft PRs, ignored labels, oversized diffs, matched ignore patterns) do not count.
  • Each push to a PR re-runs the review on the updated diff and counts as a separate review.
  • @mergewatch mentions in PR comments that trigger a re-review also count.

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What happens when your balance runs out

If a review is dispatched and your balance is below the minimum:
  1. MergeWatch posts a GitHub Check Run with action_required: credits required on the PR.
  2. A GitHub Issue is filed in the repository: “MergeWatch: reviews paused — credits required”.
  3. No review comment is posted. Existing comments on prior PRs remain untouched.
  4. Once you add credits, the next PR event is reviewed normally and the blocking issue is auto-closed.

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No per-seat fees

MergeWatch never charges per user, per seat, or per repository. A single billing account covers everyone in your GitHub organization. Add as many developers and repos as you want — billing is based solely on review cost.

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Self-hosted is always free

If you self-host MergeWatch, there is no MergeWatch fee. You pay only your LLM provider (Anthropic API, Amazon Bedrock, Ollama, or any provider supported via LiteLLM). See Self-Hosting Overview.

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Next steps

Getting Started

Install the GitHub App and start reviewing PRs in minutes.

Data Residency

Understand where your data is processed and stored.