“Free forever” can sound like a slogan broad enough to cover anything. It is more useful when read narrowly: as the name of a free plan with a published allowance and checking pace, not as a claim that every part of the product is unlimited.

The Litter Tray has a Free state for a tray without a paid subscription. It is not a paid-plan trial with a clock running in the background. The current product has no paid trial, and Free does not need a payment subscription.

Why have a free plan at all?

Need and ability to pay do not arrive on the same schedule. A channel can have a community worth looking after before it produces enough money to justify another monthly bill.

That gap matters here. Mike built The Litter Tray after his own channel grew to 50,000 subscribers and its comments grew well past 50,000. He wanted to care for the community around it without bracing himself to open the comments. A creator should not have to reach that scale before moderation help becomes available.

The Free Plan starts from a simple judgement: a community's need for care is not less real because its creator cannot pay today. It is a practical entry point whose published allowance and checking pace can be read before anyone connects a channel.

What the Free Plan includes today

Two figures are settled for public plan copy:

  • 50 AI credits a month. One credit is one successful AI prompt: a comment classification, a rule preview, or an idea digest.
  • New comments checked about every hour.

The Free Plan does not expire. Inside the product today, the deciding fact is whether a tray has a paid subscription. Subscriber count is not an eligibility gate.

The one thing Free asks of you: turn up

There is a condition, and it is the only one. A free tray is kept by being used. If nobody who administers it signs in for three days, we pause it and email you to say so. If nobody has signed in by day five, the tray is closed and its imported data is wiped.

Signing in before the tray closes stops the inactivity closure. If it has already closed, returning starts a fresh tray; it does not restore the old imported data.

Pausing means the checking stops. It does not mean anything is deleted. Your rules, your archive and anything waiting for your decision are all still there, and they stay there through the pause and through the two days after the email.

We do not close a tray without writing to you first. If that email cannot be delivered, the tray is not closed at all: it waits for a person to look at it. The warning is not a formality we can skip when it is inconvenient.

Paid plans do not pause for inactivity. None of this applies to Solo, Creator or Studio. A paid tray runs whether or not you ever open it, which is a quiet part of what paying buys.

So “forever” is not a promise that an abandoned tray runs for ever at our expense. It is a promise about the tier: there is no clock counting down to a bill, and no day on which Free becomes paid. What there is instead is an attendance rule, and it is written above rather than buried.

What it does not include

Free is not a paid plan with a smaller price label. Its published allowance is 50 AI credits a month, and it checks for new comments about hourly. Paid plans include more credits and shorter waits.

The Free Plan gives limited access to every feature, rather than a maze of locked pages. That makes the whole tool available to judge before paying, without making Free unlimited.

What “forever” means here

“Forever” describes time, not volume. It does not turn 50 credits into unlimited AI reading or make hourly checks as frequent as five-minute checks.

One word should not be stretched into a bundle of policies. It says nothing by itself about whether allowances can change, whether existing accounts keep old limits, whether advertising can appear, how account data may be used or what happens to paid prices. Each of those would be a separate commitment.

That leaves a narrower meaning that can be checked today. Free is a distinct no-subscription state, rather than a timed paid-plan trial, with a published allowance and checking pace. The name puts those details under scrutiny. It does not replace them.

Correction, 5 September 2026: a rule preview also spends a credit. The sentence above said classification or digest only.

Correction, 20 September 2026: Clarified that signing in prevents inactivity closure only before the tray closes.