What We Pay For (and What You Don't) During the 7-Day Trial
A transparent look at how the free trial works under the hood — who covers the API costs, what the limits are, and why we built it this way.
Most "free trials" are built on dark patterns: require a credit card, auto-enroll you after 7 days, make cancellation hard, and hope you forget. We didn't want that.
Here's exactly how our trial works, who pays for what, and why we structured it this way.
What the Trial Includes
During your 7 days:
- Unlimited features. Every feature in inneRVoice — meeting summaries, flashcards, Jira integration, floating code window, content protection, Monaco editor, everything — is turned on
- Managed AI key. We cover the GPT-4o-mini API costs. You don't need your own OpenAI key
- Managed Whisper. We cover transcription costs too (capped at a reasonable audio minutes allowance so nobody runs up $500 of Whisper on us)
- No credit card. Seriously, none. We can't accidentally bill you
- No auto-enroll. When the trial ends, nothing happens. Your app just asks you to add your own API key or buy a license. That's it
What the Trial Does NOT Include
- Claude models. If you pick Claude Haiku, Sonnet, or Opus during the trial, you'll need your own Anthropic API key. We only cover GPT. Why? GPT-4o-mini is cheap enough that we can realistically absorb the cost for trial users. Claude is about 5–10x more expensive depending on the model, and covering it for free would mean either capping the trial much harder or raising the paid plan price. Neither felt right.
- Unlimited usage. There's a reasonable per-user cap on messages and audio minutes. Not because we want to be stingy — because otherwise one abusive user could spend $50 of our API budget in an afternoon. The caps are generous enough that a normal user will finish the 7 days feeling like they had enough.
Why We Built It This Way
We considered the usual trial patterns:
1. 14-day trial, credit card required, auto-charge after. Higher conversion rates but creepy. No thanks. 2. Feature-limited free tier, forever free. Sustainable only if the free tier costs nothing. For us, Whisper transcription alone makes this impossible. 3. Demo video only, no trial. Too hard to evaluate a tool without using it. 4. 7-day trial, we cover API costs, hard expiration, no auto-charge. Honest. Users evaluate the tool with their own meetings and their own interviews. If they convert, great. If not, we lose a couple of dollars.
We went with #4. It costs us roughly $2–5 per trial user in OpenAI fees. For a serious evaluation that's a fair price to pay for the chance to earn a lifetime customer.
What Happens After Day 7
Your trial ends. Two options:
1. Add your own API key. Buy a license (Starter or Pro, one-time), add your OpenAI/Anthropic key in Settings, and keep using the app. Typical API usage runs $3–8/month paid directly to the provider. No subscription to us. 2. Do nothing. The app stops working. No charges, no nagging emails.
That's the whole deal.
On Privacy During the Trial
A reasonable question: "If you're paying for the API calls, are you also reading my messages?"
No. Our backend proxies your chat request to OpenAI using our key, counts tokens for cost tracking, and throws away the content. Your transcripts stay on your device. We store only usage counters (message count, audio minutes, estimated cost) — never conversation content.
Paid users are even more private: their API calls go directly from their machine to OpenAI/Anthropic. Our servers aren't even involved.
Start the Trial
No credit card, no API key, no auto-enroll. Just a 7-day test drive of the full product.