What's Changing on the Free Plan

The free plan has changed. This post is the whole change, including the part that is a trade-off rather than a gift.

The short version

Before: 250 credits a month, refilling every month, spendable on anything.

Now: no monthly pool. Instead you get a fixed number of runs of each feature, once, and they do not expire.

Priced in the old credits, that is about 510 credits' worth against the old 250. So you start with roughly 2.0× more.

And the trade-off, stated plainly: the old 250 came back every month. These do not. They are yours once. If you used the free plan as a slow trickle over many months, this is worse for you, and I would rather write that sentence than have you discover it in week five.

Why runs instead of credits

A pool sounds more generous because it is flexible. In practice the flexibility was the problem.

Credits are fungible, so a free account could spend the entire monthly pool on CV translations and never once generate an application — the single thing the product is actually for. People were running out of credits before reaching the part that would have shown them whether any of this works.

A run of each feature cannot be misallocated. You get to try the generator whether or not you spent your CV assists, because they are not the same budget.

There was a second problem, and it was arithmetic rather than opinion. Trying everything once — two applications, an interview session, a translation, a tailored CV — comes to about 510 credits. The old plan gave you 250 a month, and two generations alone were 200 of them. Add a single interview session and you were already over budget for the month.

So a free account could not see the whole product in its first month. Or its second. You had to pick two or three features, and wait for the rest — and waiting is the one thing nobody in the middle of a job search has spare.

Now every feature is available on the day you sign up. Nothing sits behind a refill date.

The two generation runs are deliberate: one to see what comes out, and one to confirm the first was not luck.

Generated documents no longer carry a watermark — for anyone

This is the part I would most like you to notice.

A generation costs you a run or 100 credits regardless of which plan you are on. If you have paid that, in runs or in credits, the document that comes out has to be a document you can actually send. Marking it was charging full price and delivering something you had to apologise for.

So: every document produced by a generation is clean, on every tier, including Free.

Free's limit is now quantity — two full application packages — not quality. That is a much more honest boundary, and it is the one we would rather defend.

One surface still carries a watermark: exporting a CV you built in the CV Maker, on the free plan. And it comes off permanently the first time you pay anything at all — a CHF 3.90 credit pack is enough. It is keyed to whether you have ever paid, not to your current balance, so the watermark never returns — even if your credits later hit zero.

Word and plain-text export still unlock with your first credit-pack purchase. Not as a watermark trick — PDF is the format you send, while DOCX and TXT are the formats you use when you want to fine-tune something by hand.

If you already have an account

Everything you made is untouched. Your CVs, your jobs, your tracked applications and every document you have already generated stay exactly where they are. Existing accounts hold the same allowances as new ones, and nothing had to be migrated to make that true: the allowance is stored as what you have USED, so an account with nothing recorded already holds the full set.

One number did change, and I would rather point at it than let you find it. The old scheme gave you two interview sessions — but each was locked to a mode: one coaching, one practice. You now get one, and you choose which mode to spend it on.

So if you only ever wanted coaching, you had exactly one coaching session before and you have exactly one now. If you wanted to try both modes, this is one fewer. An interview session is by some distance the most expensive thing we run — fifteen exchanges plus a separately written summary — and one is the honest size for an allowance whose job is discovery rather than volume.

Two smaller things worth knowing:

• An abandoned run comes back. If a generation fails or you cancel out of one, the run is returned rather than burnt.
• Allowances are consumed before credits. If you have bought credits, your free runs are spent first, so your purchased credits last slightly longer.

When the runs are gone

Nothing is deleted and nothing locks you out. Your CVs, your jobs, your tracked applications and your generated documents all stay where they are.

What stops is generating new things, and the way forward is simple: buy a credit pack. The credits never expire, and your first purchase also permanently removes the CV Maker watermark.

If you are applying for one job a month, the CHF 3.90 pack covers it — buy small and top up only when you actually need more.

Why this changed at all

The free plan's job is to let you find out whether preparAItor is any good for your situation, using your real CV and a real vacancy you actually care about. The old pool could be spent without ever answering that question. This version cannot.

Everything above is live now. If something reads differently in your account than it does here, tell us — that is a bug in one of the two, and both are ours.

The second half is now live too

There is a second half to this: a way to earn rather than only spend. Since 11 August it is live. Complete all eight items of the free tour and the first credit pack you buy after finishing it comes with 25% bonus credits, at least 50, once per account. Here is how the free tour works.

The principle was fixed before the mechanics were. Anything you earn is earned by doing the things that actually move a job search forward — finishing your CV properly, preparing before an interview, keeping your applications tracked — and not by logging in daily to keep a streak alive. That is why there are no streaks, no daily bonuses and no timers. If it ever rewards attendance instead of progress, we have built the wrong thing.