Planning for free: what the Free plan does, and where it stops
Plenty of free tools are really just a trial with an expiry date. maebe's Free plan has no time limit and needs no payment details. What's included, what isn't, and when it's worth moving up.
With social media tools, "free" often means: everything for fourteen days, then it's over. Or a free tier cut so tightly that it can only ever be a step towards buying.
We wanted something different: a plan that doesn't expire. Free isn't a trial account, it's a state an account is allowed to stay in permanently. No credit card, no countdown.
Why Free exists at all
Social media work is rarely evenly paced. There are months with three campaigns and months when a channel just ticks along. Cancel a subscription during a quiet stretch, and you usually lose access to everything you had already planned.
That's exactly what we wanted to avoid. On the Free plan your account stays open: your posts, your media and the approval links you've already sent out all stay and keep working. When the next client or the next campaign turns up, you pick up where you left off.
What's in it, and what isn't
The Free plan is deliberately built for one person planning one channel — your own or someone else's.
The full side-by-side of all plans is in the help center under Plans compared.
The promise that matters most: nothing gets deleted
The moment most people flinch at is moving down a plan. With many tools it means: clear things out or lose them.
Approval links continuing to work matters to us in particular. Those addresses sit with our customers' clients. Switching them off without a word because someone moved to a cheaper plan would break trust with people who had no part in that decision.
How you get there
Three routes lead to the Free plan:
- Right at sign-up. Below the plan cards there's a direct route into Free.
- After the trial period. Try everything for 14 days, book nothing, and you land on Free instead of a locked account. You get an email about it.
- From a paid plan. A running subscription ends normally at the end of its billing period, after which the account continues on Free.
Seeing Pro again, without paying
The Free plan has no AI features. Those are precisely the ones that are hard to judge if you've never had them in your own day-to-day work.
So on the dashboard there's the task Your first three posts: plan three posts with an image or video and a date, and maebe unlocks a month of Pro for you. No payment details, nothing to cancel — afterwards your account continues on Free. How it works in detail is in the help center under Your first three posts.
When Free stops being enough
Honestly, there are three points where the free plan gets tight quickly:
- As soon as there are two of you. Free is limited to one person. A second team member, roles and permissions belong on a paid plan.
- As soon as more clients arrive. One project covers one channel, not a portfolio.
- As soon as video is part of the routine. 5 GB is plenty for images and goes quickly with regular video.
If that's where you are, you can switch in the plan overview with one click. What the plans cost and what each one adds is on the pricing section; the details of the free plan are in the help center under The Free plan.
This article was written with the help of AI. Research, claims and point of view were reviewed and are owned by Kristof.
