We don’t have a free tier. We have an earned tier.

Anyone you've enrolled to earn — free tier, paid tier, or a plan of your own invention. Plenty of teams let paying customers earn too, for the month they blow past their limit. People who never join don't count against your capacity. Once someone is enrolled they hold their place until you release it: we never take a place back on our own, and a user who goes quiet costs you nothing. Your dashboard shows how many enrolled users actually earned this month, so releasing the ones who never will is your call, made with the number in front of you.

No. The earned tier is your only unpaid tier: a limited baseline lives inside it, and posting expands beyond it. Your real paid plans sit alongside it, completely untouched.

They post publicly, in their own words, carrying your @mention and your partner tag — #YourBrand_Partner. The first post carries their claim code too. Earnesty verifies the post mechanically and tells your product to grant the amount you set. Replies to the post earn a bonus on top, up to a ceiling you set.

You grant the same credits you were already giving away for nothing. The difference is that something comes back for them now. The dashboard puts posts and replies next to the credit cost, using the per-credit figure you enter, so you can judge the trade yourself. You set the cap on the reply bonus, so the ceiling is yours — and the subscription above it never moves with posting volume.

On every plan, a post is verified the moment your user presses check-now on their status page or pastes the post's link, and a post older than a week can always be recovered by pasting its link. On paid plans we also look once a day on our own, so a post from someone who forgot is found and paid anyway. What a post earns is the same however it was found: it is priced at the moment it was made.

Nothing breaks. Your earned tier keeps running and your users keep earning — verification and credit delivery are never gated. You stop accruing new seats until you post again.

One Growth, at $79 for 5,000 places. Three Starters would carry 3,000 for $87, so Growth is cheaper from 2,001 users up. The same arithmetic runs all the way up the ladder: two Starters carry 2,000 for $58, three Growths carry 15,000 for $237, and one Scale carries 25,000 for $249. Hold as many of a plan as you need and the price of the next band is always where you would have stacked past it.

Capacity gates new enrollment only, so your existing users are never affected — nobody is unseated for going quiet. At the ceiling you can earn more seats by posting, add another plan, or pause new enrollment. Seats you earn are yours for good: they never reset, and they survive a plan change. Each plan has a ceiling on how far posting can grow it — 500 on Earned, twice the included count on every paid plan — and a downgrade lowers the ceiling for future posting, never the seats you already hold. The ceiling is the plan's, and does not multiply with how many of it you hold. A post about Earnesty earns the same seats on every plan.

AI/credit-based SaaS and prosumer tools where hitting a limit means "time to refill," not "my business is down." It's deliberately not for mission-critical infrastructure.