Free vs Pro: what you get without paying, and why we never cap properties

Pricing pages tell you what things cost. This is the other half: why the lines are drawn where they are. If you only want the numbers, they are in the next two sections and nothing is hidden in the rest.

The free tier, in full

Sign in with Google and every property you have access to appears, with real numbers on each and no cap on how many. For each property: a 7, 28 and 90-day overview with deltas, the top 100 queries, pages, countries and devices, the striking-distance view of queries at positions 8 to 20, and change investigation showing the top three pages or queries behind any move. Client tags and colours, favourites and hidden properties, so the list is organised the way you work. Home Screen and Lock Screen widgets for every property. A watchlist of five queries. URL inspection, five a day. Sitemaps, read-only. A CSV export of whatever you are looking at, with a context header row. An offline cache, so the last data loaded is still there on a train. And Demo Mode, which runs the whole app, Pro screens included, on a sample dataset with no sign-in at all.

That is not a teaser. For someone with one or two sites who wants yesterday’s number on the Home Screen and a list of queries worth a push, it is the product.

What Pro adds

Pro is $4.99 a month or $14.99 a year. New subscribers can start the yearly plan with a first month for $0.99, and it renews at $14.99 a year after that. There is no weekly plan, no free trial and no lifetime option.

For that: sixteen months of history with custom ranges and period comparison; change investigation showing twenty contributors and kept as history; push alerts, the anomaly, new-top-ten, watched-URL indexing and sitemap rules, each with its evidence snapshot; the Monday digest; an unlimited watchlist; more than one Google account in the same portfolio; unlimited URL inspection; sitemap submit and delete; Core Web Vitals and PageSpeed per page; the comparison CSV with previous-period columns; branded and white-label PDF reports; and the cannibalisation detector.

Pro is priced per person. Three properties or thirty, the price is the same.

Why properties are never capped

Every other app in this category that we have looked at either charges by the number of sites or hides most of the data until you pay. We understand the logic: properties are the obvious thing to count. It is also the wrong thing to count, because it makes the free tier useless for exactly the person a Search Console app is most useful to, the freelancer or agency managing sites for other people. A free tier that shows three of your twenty properties is a demo, not a tier.

So we charge for depth instead. History costs us storage. Alerts cost us a server that runs every six hours. Exports and the detector cost us engineering. The number of properties costs us nothing, and we are not going to charge you for something that costs us nothing. This is the one line we will not move. The comparison pages show each competing app’s own pricing from its own listing, so you can check the claim.

Why there is no free trial

There is a paid first month at $0.99 on the yearly plan instead, and it is deliberately not a trial. A free trial produces a lot of starts from people who forget to cancel, which is revenue nobody should want and reviews nobody should want more. A first month that costs a dollar produces fewer starts, from people who have decided they want the thing, and that is the relationship we would rather have.

Because it renews at the full yearly price, we name that price in the same sentence as the $0.99, everywhere the offer appears, including here. Nobody should find out what the second charge is from their bank.

Why there is no weekly plan

Several apps in the category sell a weekly subscription, and their own reviews show how it is received: as the price you did not notice until it had charged you eight times. We had one in an earlier draft of the pricing and removed it. Two rungs are enough, and a ladder that reads as a trap is worse than no ladder.

How billing actually works

Payment is taken by Apple or Google through your store account; we never see your card. Subscriptions renew until you cancel, and you cancel from your phone’s subscription settings, not from us. Cancelling stops the renewal and you keep Pro until the period you paid for runs out. The introductory month is offered once, to new subscribers, on the yearly plan, and cancelling during it means nothing further is charged. Refunds are the store’s to give under the store’s policy; we cannot issue them, but tell us if something went wrong and we will help you make the case.

Prices may change for future periods. An existing subscription keeps its price until it renews, and the store notifies you of an increase and asks you to agree before it takes effect.

What is not for sale at any price

Rank tracking, because it breaks Google’s terms. Your Search Console data, to anyone, for anything, because Google’s Limited Use policy forbids it and so would we. And a per-property price, for the reasons above. The support page has the billing questions people ask most, and the answer to any you do not find there is an email away.