Free tier usage limits

The Free tier is built to let you evaluate the product on a real federal-civilian capture problem without a credit card. It is not crippled — but it is capped. The caps below are the canonical numbers; if a tooltip in the UI disagrees, the UI is wrong and should be reported.

Caps

• 50 search queries per calendar month. Faceted search, saved-search creation, and ad-hoc Brief regenerations all count. The counter resets at 00:00 UTC on the 1st.
• 1 active case. Cases hold evidence pinned from Briefs, search results, and the network graph. You can close a case and open a new one; you cannot hold two open simultaneously.
• 5 saved searches. Saved searches re-run on cadence but do not fire alerts on the Free tier.
• Top-3 daily Brief. The Brief is generated normally, but only the top three synthesized paragraphs are rendered. The remaining paragraphs are visible in the archive once you upgrade.
• 30-day Brief archive. Older Briefs are purged from primary storage. Pro+ retains them indefinitely.
• PDF export only. DOCX, JSON, and workspace archive exports are Pro+.

What is not capped

• Number of personas you can configure (5 max, same as Pro)
• Number of agencies you can watch (top-3 cap on Free, full list on Pro+)
• Number of citations rendered inside the visible paragraphs
• Inaccuracy reports — every paragraph carries the report button regardless of tier

Hitting a cap

When you hit a cap, the UI surfaces an inline upgrade prompt with the specific number you hit (e.g., "You've used 50 of 50 monthly queries"). The prompt deep-links to /pricing with the relevant tier preselected. No work is lost — your saved searches, cases, and watches persist across the cap event.

Why these specific caps

The Free tier is designed around a single-analyst evaluation of two-to-three agencies for one quarter. 50 queries / 1 case / 5 saved searches / 30-day archive is our judgement of the right envelope for that workload — a design choice, not a measurement. We do not publish usage statistics we have not measured.

If your usage pattern bumps a cap regularly inside a month, Pro removes every cap above for $39/mo.