Introducing the Eco Plan: Serious AI, $9/mo, a Fraction of the Energy

A few months ago we shipped Eco Mode — a routing option that sends your request to highly capable, energy-efficient AI models instead of the most powerful (and most expensive) frontier ones. We built it as a feature. It turned out to be a philosophy.

The response told us something: a lot of people don't want the most powerful AI in the world for every message. They want strong, dependable intelligence that doesn't burn through their budget — or a data center — to draft an email. So today we're making efficiency a first-class citizen on ARMES.

Meet the Eco plan: $9/month, with a 3-day free trial. And at its center, a new flagship agent: ARMES GPT ECO.

What sparse models actually are

When a dense frontier model answers you, the full network fires — often hundreds of billions of parameters, whether you asked for a business plan or a birthday message. That's powerful, and for most everyday tasks, wasteful.

The models behind Eco use sparse Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures. They carry enormous knowledge — hundreds of billions, even a trillion total parameters — but route each request through only the expert sub-networks relevant to the task. A 671-billion-parameter model might activate just 37 billion for your answer. Across the Eco pool, that's roughly 3–6% of total parameters per response.

That is not a compromise. It's engineering. Less compute per answer means less energy per answer and dramatically lower cost — without meaningfully sacrificing quality on everyday work.

And these are not budget models. As of this writing, the Eco pool includes models that match Claude Opus-class systems on real coding benchmarks (SWE-Bench Verified), score near-perfect on competition math (AIME), and coordinate up to 100 parallel sub-agents for research. The live pool is always visible — with Eco badges — on our models page.

ARMES GPT ECO: the agent built around efficiency

Every ARMES plan has a flagship agent, and Eco now has its own. ARMES GPT ECO works exactly like you'd expect an ARMES agent to work: you talk, it thinks, and behind the scenes intelligent routing picks the best model for each request. The difference is the pool it draws from — every candidate is an efficient, sparse-architecture model.

Prefer to choose yourself? Eco includes manual model selection from the efficient pool, right in the model picker.

The Eco plan also includes:

• Eco-tier agents in the ARMES Agent Library, alongside the free agents
• MCP integration — connect ARMES to Cursor, Claude Code, OpenClaw, and more
• Unlimited notes, folders, and prompt templates
• Meaningfully higher rate limits and usage budgets than Free
• The same private inference as every other plan (more on that below)

At $9/month, it's the lowest-cost way to run serious AI daily. And because every response consumes a fraction of the compute, your included budget stretches roughly 10–30x further than frontier routing. If frontier models give you ~100 quality conversations in a cycle, the efficient pool can give you 1,000+.

Already on Pro or Ultra? You've had this all along

Here's the part worth re-iterating, because it's easy to miss: every Pro and Ultra agent already has Eco Mode in its mode selector, right beside Auto.

Nothing about that changes today. If you're on Pro or Ultra, you don't need the Eco plan — you have the efficient pool and the frontier pool, and you can switch between them per chat:

• Auto Mode for the work that demands the frontier: complex strategic analysis, PhD-level reasoning, nuanced legal questions, huge documents.
• Eco Mode for everything else: drafts, brainstorms, code reviews, summaries, daily conversations.

One app. Two strategies. Zero waste. The Eco plan simply makes that second strategy available as a plan of its own, for people who want efficient AI as their whole subscription — not an add-on to a bigger one.

An honest word about trade-offs

We built our reputation on not overselling privacy, and we're not going to oversell efficiency either.

Eco is not a downgrade — it's a different optimization target. Frontier routing optimizes for absolute best intelligence. Eco optimizes for the best intelligence per dollar and per watt. For the vast majority of everyday AI tasks, you won't notice a meaningful quality difference. For your very hardest work — deep reasoning, complex analysis, very large documents — frontier models on Pro and Ultra remain the better choice, and we'll tell you so.

If that honesty costs us a few upgrades, fine. It's the same reason we publish our rate limits and our architecture.

Same privacy. Always.

Every model in the efficient pool runs through the same zero-data-retention infrastructure as everything else on ARMES. Your conversations are processed and immediately forgotten — never stored, never profiled, never monetized. The privacy guarantee is identical regardless of plan, mode, or model.

We think of it as one principle applied twice: sovereignty over your data, and sovereignty over your resources. You shouldn't have to hand over your privacy to use frontier AI, and you shouldn't have to burn frontier-scale compute to answer everyday questions.

The bigger picture

The Mixture-of-Experts revolution proved that activating 37 billion parameters out of 671 billion is enough to deliver exceptional results for most tasks. We believe AI platforms have a responsibility to offer that choice — and to reward you for taking it.

Use the full power of the frontier when it matters. Run efficient the rest of the time. Either way, stay private.

Try the Eco plan with a 3-day free trial — cancel anytime before day 3 and you're never charged. Or, if you're on Pro or Ultra, open any chat and flip the mode selector to Eco. It's been waiting for you.

Start Eco → · How Eco works → · The live model pool →

Joseph Founder, ARMES Labs