Does a NetShow Alive avatar cost anything per minute?

No. A NetShow Alive face costs $0.00 per minute to run, and the reason is where it is drawn.

A streamed avatar is video. Somebody's server renders every frame and sends it down the wire to your visitor, so every minute on screen costs that server time, and the cost is passed on by the minute. A NetShow Alive avatar is a small program that your visitor's own browser runs. The browser draws every frame on the visitor's device, from a package that downloads once. Nothing streams, so there is nothing to bill: an hour on screen costs exactly what a minute costs.

That is why the avatar can sit on every page, greet every visitor and stay open as long as they like without a meter running. It is also why the face is the same price on the free plan as on any other.

Two things are separate from that figure, and it is worth being exact about them.

The thinking. When your agent answers with a hosted model, that model is doing work, and that is what plans count: conversations a month, not minutes of face. The plans page shows what each plan includes.

The voice. A spoken reply from a model voice is a model call too, so it is not part of the $0.00 figure either. Where an agent uses the browser's own speech, the dock shows it plainly: "voice: local · $0".

So the honest sentence is this: the face is free to run, every minute, for every visitor; you pay for what the agent thinks and says, never for being seen. The article Every agent harness, brought home to one Alive avatar explains how the face and the agent behind it fit together, and the Alive page lets you watch a face run with its own clock.