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Plans, billing and trial codes

Three tiers. The free one is a working product rather than a trial, and the paid ones are mostly about removing a cap.

No card, and no expiry.

  • 10 recipes
  • 5 blending sessions
  • The full editor, style bars and calculation engine
  • The whole water and mash-pH toolkit
  • BeerXML and BeerJSON import, BeerJSON export
  • 10 assistant messages a month

Every feature is in the free tier. What is capped is how many documents you keep and how much of the assistant you use.

  • Unlimited recipes
  • Unlimited batches, blends, inventory and imports
  • Sync across every device
  • The same 10 assistant messages a month
  • Everything in Brewmaster
  • 200 assistant messages a month
  • Recipe generation, water advice and diffs on tap
  • A fair-use allowance, not a meter you watch

Brewmaster deliberately carries the same small assistant allowance as Free. If what you want is the assistant as a daily tool, that is the Beerwright tier and the app will say so rather than upselling you from a recipe cap.

Not a recipe. A blending session is a separate document for mixed-fermentation work: the component beers going into a blend with their volumes and gravities, any fruit or syrup, and how the result is split between keg and bottle. It has its own page in the app, and its own cap on the free tier — five.

The count is per calendar month and resets at midnight UTC on the 1st, the same moment for everybody. Nothing is prorated and there is no per-account anniversary.

When it runs out the assistant says exactly what happened and when it comes back, and points out that nothing else has changed:

Everything else in Beerwright is untouched — the editor, the water tools and your recipes all still work.

The sidebar only shows a usage meter when the allowance is one you are paying for — a Beerwright plan — and only past halfway. A permanent counter on the free tier would read as a countdown to a paywall, so there is not one.

Payment is handled by Paddle, who are the merchant of record. The checkout opens as an overlay inside the app rather than sending you to another site, and it is themed to whichever mode you are in.

Once the payment lands, the cap lifts in place — no reload, no sign-out. If Paddle’s confirmation reaches the app before the receipt is fully processed you will briefly see “Payment received — activating your plan…”, and then it is done.

Afterwards, Settings → Account → Plan carries a Manage billing button. It opens Paddle’s own customer portal in a new tab, which is where cards, invoices, tax details and cancellation live.

Cancelling does not take effect immediately: the plan reverts to Free when the period you have paid for actually ends. A failed payment does not drop you either — the plan is held through Paddle’s retry cycle rather than cut off on the first decline.

A trial code puts an account on a paid plan for a number of calendar months. It is deliberately not a card-on-file trial: there is nothing to cancel, and it does not convert into a subscription by itself.

Codes look like BW-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX. Redeem one in Settings → Account, under Have a code?. The app’s own description of what you are getting:

A trial code puts this account on a paid plan for a few months. It lapses back to Free when it runs out — there is no card and nothing to cancel.

On success you are told when it ends, in months rather than to the minute: Yours until March 2027, then back to Free unless you subscribe. That date is shown on the Settings plan row for as long as the code is running. It is deliberately not put in the sidebar, where it would turn a status line into a countdown.

A code that does not work gets one message — “That code isn’t valid.” — whether it is unknown, already used by you, or out of uses. That is on purpose: a more specific error would be a way to test guessed codes.

Nothing happens to the account, and nothing happens on a schedule. The plan is resolved every time it is read, so an expired code simply reads as the free tier from the moment it expires. See below for what that means in practice.

If you subscribe part-way through a trial, the expiry is cleared: you are on a paid plan, not a paid plan with a countdown still attached.

Nothing you have made is deleted, hidden or locked.

The caps are enforced at one point — when you try to create a new recipe or a new blend. Everything else passes through untouched. So an account with 15 recipes that drops to Free keeps all 15, can open and edit all 15, can export all 15, and simply cannot add a sixteenth until it is back under the cap or back on a paid plan.

You find out at the moment it matters rather than in advance: the new recipe appears, the server declines it, and it rolls back with a message saying which plan you are on and what the limit is. That is one code path rather than two, and the one that runs is the authoritative one.

The same rule holds for a refund or a chargeback, and for a subscription that is cancelled: the entitlement returns to Free, and the workspace does not change.

The import dialog checks the cap before it starts rather than after, so it can tell you that a file with forty recipes in it will contribute three. See Importing recipes.