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EnglishWhat does HotTea cost and what do you get in the paid pilot?
Updated
HotTea's founding-team access is listed at $199/month, including 25 candidate sessions and an estimated 2M token cap per month. The plan is built around hard cost caps rather than usage-based overage: prompt length, message count, candidate session count, and monthly token ceilings are described as hard stops, so requests stop before you go over. Access activates the moment payment clears through Stripe Checkout. This fits assessment teams that already run practical coding tasks and want a reviewer packet for agentic engineering, not teams looking for a free trial or a proctored exam environment.
What the $199/month covers
| Item | Included |
|---|---|
| Price | $199/mo, founding-team access |
| Candidate sessions | 25 per month |
| Token cap | Estimated 2M tokens/month |
| Overage | None — requests stop at the cap |
| Billing | Stripe Checkout; access activates when payment clears |
The pricing page lists a single founding-access tier. There is no published free tier or per-seat breakdown in the available material, so treat the $199 figure as the entry cost for a paid pilot rather than a starting point for negotiation.
What lands in the reviewer packet
Each candidate gets an isolated developer VM with Claude, Codex, tests, git, and normal shell tooling — no locked browser or mock IDE. The packet combines:
- Transcript of the candidate's AI turns
- Terminal output and git snapshots
- Final diff and test results, including hidden checks
- Reviewer note and a structured fluency analysis with quoted reasoning moments, probe responses, and follow-up questions
The sample packet shows this in practice: a senior backend candidate spent 29 minutes and 3 AI turns on an invite-acceptance regression, scored 9/10 on AI fluency, passed 4/4 hidden checks, and the reviewer note captured where the candidate rejected Claude's first suggestion and moved expiry validation ahead of the retryable membership branch.
Why the cost structure matters for a pilot
The guardrails are the selling point as much as the price. Because prompt length, message count, session count, and monthly tokens are hard stops, a pilot with a fixed candidate cohort has a predictable ceiling — you won't discover an overage bill after a busy month. The trade-off is that if you exhaust 25 sessions or the token cap, requests stop rather than scaling automatically, so plan your cohort size against the monthly allowance.
Who this is for
HotTea is aimed at teams that already use GitHub-based assessments and want an audit trail of how a candidate directs an agent — what they probe, push back on, and verify. It is not a proctoring tool; the candidate works the way they normally work, and you read the receipts.
If your hiring process is still manual review of diffs and tests, the packet adds a layer you may not need yet. If reviewers are already disagreeing about AI-assisted submissions and you want that disagreement documented with evidence, the $199/month pilot is the low-commitment way to test it on one cohort.