The engine itself costs nothing. You only pay for the third-party APIs it calls — OpenAI, Replicate, and Twitter/X Developer access.
Clone for FreeZirelia is licensed under ELv2 — you can use it freely for personal projects and internal business use. The only restriction: you may not provide it as a managed service to third parties (no "Zirelia as a SaaS" reselling).
Zirelia is free — but these services are not. Here's what to budget.
Using GPT-4 instead of mini increases cost ~10x
Save with FLUX.1 schnell (~$0.003/image) for drafts
Costs scale linearly with post volume. Apply for a developer account at developer.x.com.
per month, for 3–5 posts/day with images
* Estimates only. Actual costs depend on post frequency, model choice, and usage patterns.
The quality difference for social posts is minimal, but the cost is 10x lower. Set in your .env file.
Schnell is ~20x cheaper than pro. Use for warmup phase when image quality is less critical.
Good for account warmup AND keeps API costs low while you tune your persona config.
Use --mode text for replies
and reactions — no image cost, still builds engagement.