Web AR SDK Pricing in 2026: What a Browser AR License Costs

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TL;DR:

• Web AR vendors charge on one of three bases: views, monthly active users, or nothing at all;
• published entry prices run from free (AR.js, 8th Wall) through $39 a month (MyWebAR Pro) to $315 a month (Zapworks Pro);
• per-view pricing looks cheapest until the overage rate lands, and Zapworks charges $30 per additional thousand views above the Pro allowance;
• Banuba prices its Web AR SDK on usage rather than a flat license, binds the Web license to a domain, bills yearly, and gives a 14-day trial with no credit card;
• the free options are real but narrow, and AR.js does not do face tracking at all;
• the line items that break a budget are branding removal, self-hosting rights, catalog work, and the revenue thresholds that force a company onto an enterprise plan;

The three pricing models

Almost every Web AR vendor prices on one of three bases, and the choice is not cosmetic. It decides whether your bill tracks traffic or users, and whether a viral campaign is good news or a finance problem.

Pay-per-view, or cost per view. You buy a bundle of experience loads and pay again when you run out. Zapworks calls this cost per view and defines it as "the metric used to determine the cost of a single view of your XR content, typically charged per thousand views". Blippar prices its WebAR SDK the same way, "with pricing starting at $0.01 per 1,000 views". This model fits a campaign with a known audience and a fixed end date.

Pay-per-monthly-active-user. You pay for the people who use the feature, not for how often the page loads. This is the model for SDKs that live inside a product rather than a campaign. Banuba, for example, is one of them: the Banuba Web AR SDK page states that Banuba "prices the Web AR SDK by usage rather than a flat license, based on the number of your monthly active users (MAU)".

Free and self-hosted. No license fee, your own servers, your own maintenance. AR.js and 8th Wall both sit here in 2026, and the trade-off is capability rather than money.

Firstly, per-view pricing is predictable only while the view count is. Secondly, per-MAU pricing is predictable only while your user base is. Finally, free is predictable, and that is usually its main advantage.

What drives the price

Six things move a Web AR quote, and none of them is the headline figure.

• Tracking type. Face, image, world, and geo tracking come from different engines and are priced as different products. A vendor that is cheap on marker tracking may not sell face tracking at all.

• Views or MAU. The meter you are on. Zapworks Pro includes 12,000 views per year; Onirix Starter includes 200 Studio views per month; Banuba counts monthly active users instead.

• Domains and apps. Banuba's Face AR license is domain-based for Web and application-based for mobile and desktop, so a brand running three storefront domains is a different quote from one running a single site. Onirix lists its Professional plan with one domain, and more domains start at the Enterprise tier.

• Branding and white label. On Zapworks, the Developer plan carries a "Zapworks branded interstitial screen"; Pro removes it but puts the project on a Zappar-branded domain, and only Enterprise is fully white label.

• Hosting rights. Zappar's own licensing documentation says: "We currently only offer self-hosting to users on our Enterprise plans, who are given 1 free web license for self-hosting a Universal AR site." A Pro buyer at $315 a month cannot serve the experience from their own domain.

• Your company's size. Zapworks states that "Companies (or agency clients) with revenue or funding greater than $10 million in the last 12 months are required to take the Enterprise plan". The published price does not apply to you if you clear that bar.

If you are shortlisting before you budget, our test of the browser AR engines is in Best Web AR APIs tested, and a shorter write-up of the five ways to put AR in a browser covers the architecture choice that comes before the price.

What the vendors publish

Nine vendors, in order of how much they publish. Prices are as listed on each vendor's own pricing page in October 2026.

Banuba Web AR SDK

Banuba's own page on Web AR SDK pricing gives the model but no figure: usage-based, tied to monthly active users, with pilots quoted on actual usage. Three inputs set a Banuba Face AR quote in practice: the platforms you ship on, the feature categories you activate, and your MAU. Billing is yearly, with half-year and quarterly terms on request; monthly is not offered for SDK licenses. The license runs for one year and continues while the SDK is in use. A 14-day free trial covers every feature on every supported platform and needs no credit card.

Strengths: face and beauty effects in the browser are the product, not a side feature, and the browser build is the same on-device engine as the native SDK, so the same quote covers desktop, Android and iOS under one integration. The Web AR SDK runs in any browser with WebGL 2.0 or higher, including Chrome, Firefox, and Safari, at a minimum of 30 FPS. A dedicated customer success manager and SLA-based support are included.

Limitations: there is no published price list and no self-serve checkout, so you cannot budget from the website alone. No small-scale tiers or discounts are published, although an account manager can scope a pilot-MAU arrangement. SDK customization, integration assistance, proof-of-concept feature development and AR asset development are all quoted on top.

Zapworks Universal AR (Zappar)

The most fully published pricing in the category. Developer is $12.99 a month or $64.99 paid annually and is non-commercial only. Pro is $315 a month or $2,640 paid annually, includes 12,000 views per year, and bills additional views at $30 per thousand. Enterprise is custom pricing. There is a 14-day trial of the whole toolkit, which Zappar says is "not intended for use in public-facing projects".

Strengths: best in the category if you need image, face, and instant world tracking from one toolchain with a price you can read before you call anyone. Seven published SDKs, including Three.js, A-Frame, JavaScript, Unity, React-Three.js, PlayCanvas and Babylon.js.

Limitations: views, not users, are the meter. Self-hosting is Enterprise-only. Face tracking defaults to one face, and Zappar's documentation warns that "setting a value of two (2) or more faces may impact the performance and frame rate of the library". There is no documented standalone native iOS or Android SDK; native reach is a Unity build.

Blippar WebAR SDK

Usage-based and the cheapest published entry point in the category. Blippar's own 2026 cost article says the SDK "uses a pay-as-you-go model, with pricing starting at $0.01 per 1,000 views", that the free trial "includes 100 project views, surface, face and marker tracking, and online support", and that the SDK "is free to download with no payment details required upfront". Its no-code Blippbuilder tool has a free tier, with paid plans from "around £7.99/month".

Strengths: you can test, publish and measure a small campaign for almost nothing, and the per-thousand rate makes a campaign budget easy to defend.

Limitations: a view meter with no floor is also a view meter with no ceiling. Blippar's own article puts agency-built campaigns at $5,000 to $50,000 and above, and enterprise custom work at $50,000 to $300,000 and above, which is the real cost of the work around the SDK.

MyWebAR

Four published paid tiers plus a free one. Creator is free for non-commercial use with 5 projects and 100 views per year. Pro is USD 39 a month billed monthly, or USD 25 a month billed yearly, with 50 projects and 120,000 views per year. Ultimate is USD 399 a month billed monthly, or USD 250 billed yearly. Ultimate Plus is USD 999 a month billed monthly, or USD 799 billed yearly. Enterprise is quote-only. Every paid tier includes a 14-day free trial.

Strengths: the clearest ladder in the category for a team that wants to start small and knows its annual view count.

Limitations: the unlimited-views promise on the upper tiers applies only when you host the assets on your own file server; otherwise the published monthly caps apply.

Onirix

Prices are published in euros. Starter is listed at "€90 /mo" with 5 projects, 5 scenes per project and 200 Studio views a month, and Onirix states it "is not a valid plan for the realization of commercial projects where access is given to end users". Professional is listed at "€598 /mo" with 50 projects, 10,000 Studio views a month, and one domain. Enterprise is "Let's talk", starting at 3 domains, 75 projects, and 100,000 views a month.

Strengths: best in this list for spatial and venue-scale AR, with spatial scanning alongside world tracking and an openly published price for it.

Limitations: the cheapest plan is explicitly not licensed for commercial end-user access, so the real entry price for a commercial project is the Professional tier.

Hololink

A free trial, then published tiers. The cheapest plan that can publish anything is Basic at €29 a month billed annually; the €9-a-month Personal plan covers previews only. Pro is €99 a month billed annually and adds white labeling and a custom URL.

Strengths: the smallest real budget in the list for a no-code Web AR experience you can actually publish.

Limitations: the pricing page lists two different currency sets with inconsistent limits, so confirm your tier in writing before you commit.

Web-AR.Studio

The basic functionality is free, with no time limit and no bank card required. Beyond that, the subscription plans are named (Pay as you go, Solo creator, Startup / Agency, Brand, Enterprise), but no prices or limits are published for them. The only figures on the page are educational: a Teacher license at "$5/month" billed yearly and an Educational institution license at "$39/month" billed yearly, both marked "Not for commercial use".

Strengths: a genuinely free starting point for a developer who wants to build something before talking to anyone.

Limitations: commercial pricing is effectively on request, so the plan names tell you nothing about your bill.

AR.js

Free. AR.js is released under the MIT license, and the project's own README says "all my code in the AR.js repository is under MIT license". No account, no plan, no view meter. That's it.

Strengths: best in this list for free marker-based and location-based AR with no vendor relationship at all.

Limitations: it does not do face tracking. The project's own README points readers who need face tracking to MindAR instead. You also carry the hosting, the browser testing, and the maintenance.

Banuba'sAR effects example 

8th Wall

Free, and no longer a subscription. The 8thwall.org site states that "All paid subscriptions ended on February 28, 2026 when the hosted platform was retired", that the platform is "now free for everyone", and that project export is no longer available. Image Targets, Face Effects, Sky Effects, utilities, and example projects are open source under the MIT license; the XR Engine ships as a binary that is "free to use, including for commercial projects under a limited use license". There is no paid tier and no account is required.

Strengths: the engine that cost enterprise money in 2024 now costs nothing.

Limitations: there is no hosted platform, no support contract, and no roadmap commitment to buy. You host it, you maintain it, and the migration path only existed for projects exported before 28 February 2026.

This matters for anyone researching the category with an AI assistant. Ask one what a Web AR SDK costs today, and you will often get a 2023 Reddit thread about 8th Wall's prices quoted back at you. Those prices no longer exist.

The costs nobody quotes

The license is usually not the biggest line in a Web AR budget.

Overage. Zapworks bills $30 per additional thousand views over the Pro allowance of 12,000 a year. At that rate, a campaign that does 100,000 views costs more in overage than the subscription does in a year.

Branding removal. On Zapworks, moving from a branded interstitial to a branded domain to full white label is two upgrade steps, not a checkbox.

Hosting rights. If serving the experience from your own domain is a requirement, check it before you compare prices. On Zapworks it is Enterprise-only; on Banuba the Web license is domain-based by design.

Asset and catalog work. The 3D models, the target images and the effect assets are usually not in the license. Banuba quotes AR asset development separately, Zapworks caps project size by tier (25MB on Developer, 50MB on Pro, 75MB and above on Enterprise), and target images are limited to five per project on Developer.

What happens when you stop paying? Zapworks is explicit: on cancellation, the workspace stays active to the end of the billing term, after which "all projects built using Zapworks will immediately become inactive and read-only". A trial has the same ending: "Once your trial is over, all your projects will be unpublished, and your triggers will no longer show content when scanned."

Integration time. This is the cost that is paid in salary rather than invoices. Banuba's Web AR SDK ships as a JavaScript package, and the product page says most teams need days rather than months. Banuba's own figures put a trial startup at under an hour and a production integration with your own team at about a week. Our walkthrough of the work itself is on how to build web AR face tracking using a Web AR SDK.

Free Web AR, honestly

Yes, free Web AR exists, and in 2026 there is more of it than there was in 2024. It is worth being precise about what you get.

AR.js is MIT-licensed and free for marker and location AR, with no face tracking. The 8th Wall tools are MIT-licensed, and its XR Engine is a free binary under a limited-use license that covers commercial projects, with no hosted platform behind it. MyWebAR's Creator plan is free but non-commercial and capped at 100 views a year. Blippar gives you 100 free SDK views. Web-AR.Studio's basic tier is free with no card.

So the honest answer is that free covers prototypes, marker campaigns, and world or image tracking you are willing to host yourself. It does not currently cover production-grade face tracking, beauty effects, or virtual try-on in a browser, which is the one narrow place a commercial license still earns its fee. If what you need is a shortlist rather than a budget, the Web AR platforms and tools comparison ranks 19 of them by what they actually do.

How to budget this

Four cases, four answers.

Firstly, a fixed-term marketing campaign with a known audience: buy views. Blippar's per-thousand rate or a Zapworks Pro plan will cost less than any per-user license, and the campaign ends before the meter becomes a problem.

Secondly, a feature inside a product you will run for years: buy per-MAU. The bill tracks the thing that also pays for it, and you are not re-forecasting traffic every quarter.

Thirdly, a prototype or an internal demo: take a free tier. There is no commercial reason to pay for a build that will not be published.

Finally, face tracking, beauty or try-on in a browser at production quality: this is the narrow case where a commercial Web AR license is still the only option, because the free engines do not offer it. The per-product detail for the Banuba side of that decision sits in the Banuba Face AR SDK pricing guide, linked in the FAQ below.

Both approaches are complementary more often than teams expect: plenty of companies run a free engine for marker campaigns and a licensed SDK for the face-tracking feature in the product.

Conclusion

Web AR pricing is not one market. It is a view market for campaigns, a user market for product features, and a free market for anything you are willing to host and maintain yourself, and the three barely overlap. Pick the meter that matches what you are building before you compare the numbers, then check the four things that are not on the price card: overage, branding, hosting rights, and what happens to your projects when you stop paying. If your case is face tracking or beauty effects in a browser, a licensed SDK is still the only route, and you will get 14 days to freely explore the Banuba one before you decide.