Most “free forever” plans are gates dressed up as gifts. Three documents, two collaborators, one library, and the export button greyed out until you pay. The cap exists to push you up the ladder, not to be useful on its own.
Our free plan is the whole editor, including AI Author. It exports to Markdown, Word, PDF, and print. You can share publicly or invite people privately. The version history works. The only ceiling is the document count: 25.
That number isn’t arbitrary, and it isn’t a marketing pick. Here’s the reasoning.
What 25 actually covers
We looked at how people use document apps in the first six months. The 90th percentile of personal users sits around 18 docs. Real numbers, from real onboarding sessions:
- The lease on the new place
- The speech for your mum’s 60th
- A handful of memos for work
- Notes from two or three meetings you cared about
- The packing list for the trip in July
- A draft of the thing you’ve been meaning to write
- Vacation list for May (specifically)
Twenty-five gives almost everyone room before they bump into the cap. The folks who do bump into it are usually the ones using sweetdocs daily, which is the population we’d want on Pro anyway because the AI quota matters more to them.
What the cap costs us
Every document has a small ongoing cost. Database row, full-text index entry, search shard, R2 storage for any embedded images. A few cents per active doc per year. Multiply that by a free user base that grows faster than the paid one (it always does) and the math gets uncomfortable fast.
If we cap free at three docs, we kill the use case before it forms a habit. If we cap at unlimited, the unit economics stop working before we have enough Pro conversions to offset them. Twenty-five is the number where the typical free user gets real value without us subsidizing infinite use.
What we won’t do
A few things we considered and rejected:
- Crippling the AI on free. Tempting, because AI is what costs us most per user. But AI is the thing that makes the editor different. A free plan without it is a worse demo than no free plan at all.
- Limiting exports. A doc you can’t get out of an app is a hostage. Free can export to every format Pro can.
- Trial-only free. Thirty days then it’s gone. The whole point of the cap-and-stay model is that it has to actually stay.
- Forcing a credit card on signup. Friction for everyone, designed to convert a few. The conversion lift never justifies the lost signups.
The 25-doc cap is the version that fits both the cost structure and the principle we started with: free is real, paid is more. Not free is a tease, paid unlocks the basics.
When we’ll change it
If our infrastructure costs drop or our Pro conversion rate climbs, we revise. If neither happens, we keep it. We won’t lower the cap silently, we won’t raise it silently. Whatever the number is at any moment, it’s the number every account gets, current customers included.
If you’ve got 25 docs and you’re using sweetdocs every day, you already know what Pro costs: four dollars. If you don’t, the cap means we’re not yet expensive to keep around. Both shapes work.
Either way, open the app and try it.