# Why netweft has no free tier

> A free tier for a metered product gives vendor spend to accounts that will never pay. The arithmetic that rules it out, and what is offered instead.

Source: https://netweft.com/blog/why-no-free-tier
Updated: 2026-10-15

**Every netweft lookup costs real vendor money before anybody pays anything, so a free tier spends that money on accounts that will never convert. Instead there is a read-only demo, and a short trial with 3,000 to 8,000 credits by plan, a tighter rate limit and no auto top-up.**

Most SEO tools can offer a free tier because the marginal cost of one more free
account is close to zero: the index is already crawled, the pages are already
stored, and showing them to one more person costs bandwidth.

netweft does not have that shape. Every keyword metric, every SERP check, every
backlink summary is a call to a provider that invoices for it, and the invoice
arrives whether or not the account ever becomes a customer.

## The arithmetic

One credit is $0.0001 of raw vendor cost. A rank check reads two pages of
results at the default depth, 40 credits a keyword. A
hundred tracked keywords checked once on one device is
4,000 credits of somebody else's money, spent on an account
that has paid nothing.

One check is not the problem. A thousand accounts doing that every day is
thousands of dollars a month of pure loss, and a free tier that is useful enough to evaluate
with is a free tier that is useful enough to farm. The two properties cannot be
separated: the thing that makes a free tier convincing is exactly the thing
that makes it expensive.

The usual mitigation is to cripple the free tier until it costs nothing — a
handful of lookups, most features disabled, a nag screen. That produces an
account that cannot answer the question the visitor came with, which is worse
than no account at all. It wastes their time and ours.

## What there is instead

A [read-only demo](https://app.netweft.com/demo) of a workspace already in use,
where every screen is filled and every lookup answers from sample data, so
looking around costs nobody anything.

Then a [trial](/pricing) on a real plan, with real behaviour:

- 3,000 credits on Pro, up to
  8,000 on Agency: enough to point it at a
  domain you already have opinions about and see whether the answers match
  them, as the [trial guide](/blog/spending-a-trial-well) budgets.
- A tighter rate limit while the workspace is on trial, which is the honest
  defence against automation rather than a feature lock.
- No auto top-up, so a trial cannot quietly become a bill.
- Every other behaviour identical to the paid product, including
  [the price shown before every paid operation runs](/credits).

Nothing is hidden behind the trial. The [rate card](/pricing) is public in
full, so the cost of the work you are evaluating is knowable before you start
rather than discovered afterwards.

## The part that is a real cost to us

Saying "no free tier" loses visitors who would have converted. That is a
straightforward price, and it is paid deliberately, because the alternative is
either a free tier that loses money or a free tier that does not work. Both of
those are worse trades, and only one of them is honest about it.