What 'free' actually means, and what it costs when you outgrow it
Almost every vendor here gives something away, and the free tier is the least comparable thing on any pricing page: the word covers permanent plans, trials wearing the same badge, pay-what-you-can tiers with no floor and free plans that have since been withdrawn. What is comparable is the step you take when you outgrow it, and across the vendors we can price that step ranges more than thirtyfold. This guide sets out what the word denotes, what our record can and cannot tell you about the limits, and why the first paid rung is the figure to shop on.
Seventy-six free tiers appear in our record, spread across seventy-one vendors, which makes a free plan close to standard rather than a differentiator. It is also the part of a pricing page we can tell you least about. Free-plan limits live in prose beside the plan card rather than in the price, and our extraction keeps them only where the card carried them, so of those seventy-six we hold quotable limits for eight. That is a poor ratio and it is printed rather than papered over: a limit nobody read is shown as a limit nobody read, because a summarised allowance is a number we invented.
The half we can answer is the half that decides the bill. For thirty-eight of those vendors we hold a priced first rung above the free tier, and that step is where the variation lives. NordPass asks $1.39 a month for it. Superlist asks $5 and Proton Pass $4.99. At the other end, HeyGen's first paid tier is $29, QuickBooks' is $38, Jotform's $39 and beehiiv's $49. The gap between the cheapest and the dearest first step is more than thirtyfold, and none of it is visible while you are still on the free plan comparing feature grids.
That is the practical reframing. Every free tier costs the same, so the free tier cannot be the thing you are choosing between. What you are choosing is the price of the moment it stops fitting, and that moment tends to arrive on someone else's schedule: a second collaborator, a domain, a month with more sending than usual. If two products both give you enough for nothing and one of them charges several times the other to take the next step, you have made a decision about your future bill by picking the one with the nicer onboarding.
The word itself is doing more work than it looks. Four plans in the record are trials wearing the word free in their names, which is a different product entirely: it ends by the calendar rather than by usage, and its price is not zero but deferred. Where a vendor labels a trial as a free plan on the card, that is how it goes into the record, with the name it was given and the trial nature noted, rather than being quietly promoted into the free-tier count.
Then there is the tier with no price and no floor. Akismet's personal tier asks you to name your price. It is recorded as a plan with no price rather than as a free plan, and the reasoning is worth borrowing: the page does not say the amount can be zero, so calling it free would be our inference rather than their offer. Pay-what-you-can is a real category and it is not the same as free, and the difference matters most to the people most likely to choose it.
The most useful thing a record can do with a free tier, though, is remember one that has gone. Migadu ran a free plan and has discontinued it, and its page says so. That is captured as printed, because an absence with a stated history tells you something a blank cannot: this vendor has changed its mind about giving the product away, which is a fact about direction rather than about today's price. The same record notes that there is no contact-sales tier and no lifetime option either, both recorded as readings rather than left as silence.
None of this makes free tiers a trap. They are the most useful thing in modern software pricing and they let you build the thing before you pay for it, which is not true of most of what they replaced. The argument here is narrower: that the free tier is not where the comparison happens, because it is where every vendor looks identical. Compare the first rung, ask what triggers it, and treat the free plan as what it is, which is a way of finding out whether the product works before the question of price becomes real at all.
A free tier is standard, so it cannot be the differentiator
Seventy-six of them across seventy-one vendors. When nearly everyone gives something away, the presence of a free plan carries almost no information about which product to choose, and the feature grid comparing free tiers is comparing the least consequential row on the page.
The first paid rung varies more than thirtyfold
Among the vendors where we hold both a free tier and a priced step above it, the cheapest first rung is $1.39 a month and the dearest $49. That spread, not the free plan's allowance, is what you are actually choosing between.
We can rarely tell you where free ends
Quotable limits exist for eight of the seventy-six. Free-plan allowances sit in prose rather than in the price, and where the card did not carry them the record holds nothing. Our pages say so in that spot rather than filling it with a plausible allowance.
A trial is not a free plan
Four plans carry the word free in a name that describes a trial. A trial ends on a date rather than at a usage limit, and its price is deferred rather than absent. Both go in the record, under the names their pages gave them, and they are not the same product.
Pay-what-you-can is its own category
Akismet's personal tier invites you to name a price and prints no floor. It is recorded as a plan with no price rather than as free, because nothing on the page says the amount may be zero. Reading it as free would be our assumption presented as their terms.
A withdrawn free plan is worth recording
Migadu's page states that its former free plan has been discontinued, and that is captured as read. An absence with a stated history is evidence about where a vendor is going; a blank is evidence about nothing.
Questions people actually search
Which free plan is the best one?
It is close to the wrong question, because free tiers are the part of the market that has converged. A more useful one is which first paid rung you would be willing to pay, since that is the decision the free plan is quietly making for you. Among vendors where we hold both figures, that step ranges from about the price of a coffee to something closer to a small subscription bill.
Why don't your pages list what each free plan includes?
Because for most of them we did not read it. Allowances live in prose next to the plan card, and the extraction keeps them only where the card itself carried them, which is true for eight of the seventy-six free tiers we hold. Where the limit is absent the page says the limit was not read, rather than showing a summary that would be ours rather than the vendor's.
How do I work out when I will outgrow a free tier?
Find the one limit most likely to bind for you and ignore the rest. It is usually a count rather than a capability: collaborators, sites, contacts, monthly sends, minutes. Vendors tend to set the free ceiling just below the point where a real project starts, so the honest planning assumption is that you will cross it if the project works, and the first rung is the number to have looked at in advance.
Is a free trial recorded as a free plan on this site?
No. It goes in with the name its page gave it and is not counted as a free tier, because it ends by the calendar rather than at a usage limit. The distinction changes what you should do with it: a trial is a deadline to evaluate against, while a free tier can often be a permanent home for a small project.
Do you earn anything from the vendors on this page?
From two of them. We hold affiliate relationships with beehiiv and with Akismet, and none with NordPass, Superlist, Proton Pass, HeyGen, QuickBooks, Jotform or Migadu. beehiiv appears here as the most expensive first rung we hold and Akismet as an example of a tier we declined to call free, neither of which is a placement anyone would pay for. This page carries no affiliate links; the method is on the method page.
Every price on this page resolves from a dated vendor record rather than being typed into the text, and the counts are taken from the record as it stood on 2026-09-03. Free-tier allowances are quoted only where the vendor's plan card carried them, which is true for eight of the seventy-six free tiers held; elsewhere the limit is recorded as unread rather than summarised. This page carries no affiliate links, and our affiliate relationships with two of the vendors named are disclosed in the questions above. Related: what a free tier gives you, how to read a price record and is that price per seat?. The method →
Found a price that no longer matches the vendor’s page? Tell us — corrections are dated and stay on the page.