Lakera Guard pricing, and the self-serve alternative to it

You found Lakera, started on its free Community plan, then hit the "talk to us" wall the moment you needed more than 10k requests a month. If you are a solo founder or a small team rather than a procurement department, you do not need an enterprise contract to block prompt injection. Here is the head-to-head so you can decide. We are biased, SafePrompt is our product, so we will be specific about when Lakera is the right call.

If you want the full landscape first, see our roundup of the best prompt injection detection tools. If you are on Microsoft's stack, see the Azure Prompt Shields alternative.

What is the best budget alternative to Lakera Guard?

SafePrompt is a budget-first option alongside Lakera Guard for indie developers and small teams. It publishes every price, starts at $29 per month with a free tier that needs no credit card, signs you up without a sales call, and adds an API check before your model. Detection records and earlier public benchmark material are available; exact-current suite publication needs checking before reproducing the current aggregate. Lakera Guard has a free Community plan too, but it is built for enterprise buyers, so its strengths are compliance, on-premise options, and account management rather than a published price at every tier.

The retained Lakera plan values are retained from the September 12, 2026 pricing-page snapshot. Current platform documentation confirms 10k Community requests; the pricing URL now redirects to the platform, so confirm current prices and token limits there. Anything above the Community plan is quoted by sales, so confirm your own numbers with them before deciding.

When should you choose SafePrompt over Lakera?

Choose SafePrompt when you are an indie developer, a startup, or building an MVP, and you want to ship without a sales process. The $29 per month plan fits bootstrapped budgets, the free tier needs no card, and every paid price is on the website rather than behind a quote form. Integration is one HTTP call before your model; verify the status, schema and application branches before enabling it. You can start free with 10,000 free validations a month and upgrade only when you scale.

When should you choose Lakera Guard instead?

Choose Lakera when its enterprise controls meet your procurement requirements. Its platform documentation states SOC 2 Type II certification and describes enterprise RBAC, SIEM export and flexible request volumes. Its self-hosting documentation explains the deployment option. Request the applicable audit report, deployment terms and price.

How much does each one cost?

SafePrompt publishes three tiers: a free plan with 10,000 free validations a month and no credit card, a Starter plan at $29 per month, and a Business plan at $99 per month. The retained September 12, 2026 Lakera pricing snapshot lists a Community plan at $0 per month with 10k requests and a prompt cap to confirm on the current plan, and lists its Enterprise plan as "let's chat" with flexible volume. It publishes no price above the free tier, so get that number from Lakera directly.

Do both tools detect the same attacks?

Both products screen prompt-injection attempts. Enabled categories and policies differ, so run your own attacks and ordinary messages through the configured integration. Lakera publishes PINT results; its scores and our suite measure different inputs and settings, so they do not establish a head-to-head accuracy ranking.

SafePrompt checks each request on its own and does not track sessions. To have several turns judged together, send them in one check. Preserve the actual conversation, task and permissions in your application tests.

What changes when you migrate from Lakera?

Keep an application decision with three states: allow, deny and unavailable. Lakera’s flagged: true means deny; SafePrompt’s safe: true means allow. Read only a real boolean after a successful HTTP response. Network failures and missing or malformed verdicts are unavailable, not a clean result.

The HTTP helper returns the unchanged text only after a valid verdict. Build the complete model context, including untrusted source labels, before screening it; authorize tool actions separately.

async function screenPrompt(userInput, endUserIp, timeoutMs) {
  if (typeof userInput !== 'string' || !userInput.trim() ||
      userInput.length > 50000 || typeof endUserIp !== 'string' ||
      !endUserIp.trim() || !Number.isFinite(timeoutMs) || timeoutMs <= 0) {
    throw new Error('Invalid request');
  }
  let verdict;
  try {
    const res = await fetch('https://api.safeprompt.dev/api/v1/validate', {
      method: 'POST',
      signal: AbortSignal.timeout(timeoutMs),
      headers: {
        'X-API-Key': process.env.SAFEPROMPT_API_KEY,
        'X-User-IP': endUserIp,
        'Content-Type': 'application/json'
      },
      body: JSON.stringify({ prompt: userInput })
    });
    if (!res.ok) throw new Error('HTTP error');
    verdict = await res.json();
    if (typeof verdict?.safe !== 'boolean') throw new Error('Invalid verdict');
  } catch {
    throw new Error('Validation unavailable');
  }
  if (!verdict.safe) throw new Error('Request blocked');
  return userInput;
}

If you prefer an SDK over raw HTTP, npm install safeprompt gives you the same guard in your code. Lakera's Community plan is self-serve too; a paid Lakera contract adds a sales call, a custom quote, procurement and contract review, and account-team onboarding, whose duration depends on your procurement process.

SafePrompt also publishes a reproducible benchmark on why pattern-based filters miss reworded attacks, with the method and historical results published; the repository states its exact attack strings are withheld. It measures the weakness of pattern baselines rather than a head-to-head against Lakera. It is the kind of open evidence a buyer can check rather than take on trust. See why regex fails at prompt injection for the walkthrough.

The bottom line

Frequently asked questions

SafePrompt Free includes 10,000 validations a month. Starter is $29/month for 500,000; Business is $99/month for 1,000,000. Count each submitted text item, then compare current plan features and billing or start a free evaluation.