The free tier is not a trial

Jot’s free tier is the entire capture layer. The hotkey, the parsing, the reminders, the notes and todos, full-text search over everything you ever typed, daily backups, and the AI features if you bring your own key.

No item limit. No expiry. No badge in the overlay suggesting an upgrade. It is not a trial of the product; it is the product, minus one feature.

The paid feature is synchronising captures into your own Microsoft To Do account, at €3 a month.

The test that decided it

The free/paid line was not drawn by asking what people would pay for. It was drawn by asking a narrower question:

Which part of this has an ongoing cost that does not go away if I stop working on it?

A local text field does not rot. The hotkey registration will work identically in five years. The parser will keep parsing. SQLite will keep being SQLite. Once those are written and correct, they cost nothing to keep working, so charging a recurring fee for them is charging rent on a finished thing.

A client for somebody else’s API is the opposite. Microsoft will change something. A token format will shift, an endpoint will be deprecated, an error code will start meaning something new, a scope will need re-consenting. None of that is on my schedule and all of it breaks the feature silently for everyone until somebody notices and fixes it.

That is a genuine, permanent, recurring cost. A recurring price is the honest shape for it.

The same test explains why the AI features are free despite being the most expensive-sounding thing in the product. You supply the API key. You pay Anthropic or OpenAI directly, at their rates, for exactly what you use. There is no inference bill on this end, so there is nothing to meter and nothing to charge for. Metering it anyway would be charging for the privilege of using your own key.

What a crippled free tier actually costs

The usual model is to make the free tier annoying: cap the captures, watermark something, put a nag in the flow.

For this product that would destroy the thing being sold.

The overlay is meant to appear, take a line, and vanish. An upgrade prompt in that four-second window is not a marketing inefficiency, it is a defect in the core interaction. A cap on captures makes the tool unusable for the exact behaviour it is trying to create — capture everything, without deciding whether it is worth a slot.

And the person who would hit that cap is the person who has adopted the habit, which is to say the only person who will ever pay for anything.

So the free tier is generous because a mean one would break the product, not because of generosity.

The trial starts when you connect, not when you install

The 14-day trial of sync begins the moment you connect a Microsoft account. Not on first launch.

This is a small mechanism with a specific purpose: it means nobody burns their trial while using the free layer.

The alternative — a trial starting at install — punishes the normal path. Someone installs Jot, uses local capture for three weeks because it is genuinely useful on its own, and then decides they would like the reminder on their phone. Under an install-day trial they have already used it up without ever seeing the feature. They now have to pay to evaluate something, which is the moment most people close the window.

Tying the trial to the feature means the free tier can be used indefinitely without cost or pressure, and the evaluation period is fourteen days of actually evaluating.

Cancelling takes nothing away

If you stop paying, sync stops. That is the whole consequence.

Captures stay in the file on your disk. The application keeps opening on the hotkey. Reminders keep firing locally. Tasks already pushed to Microsoft To Do stay in your Microsoft account, because they were always yours — Jot put them there, it does not hold them there.

This matters more than it sounds. A subscription that takes your data hostage on cancellation is not selling you a feature, it is selling you continued access to your own history. That model works, commercially, and it is the reason people are suspicious of subscriptions in the first place.

The version where cancelling costs you nothing except the feature you stopped paying for is a weaker business and the only one I would want to explain to somebody.

The honest caveat

Nobody has paid for this, because it cannot be bought. The purchase path is a Microsoft Store add-on that does not exist yet, and no session has ever queried a real Store licence.

Which means the pricing above is a stated intention rather than a working transaction, and the truthful post-trial state in today’s builds is “expired”, because there is no channel through which anyone could have paid.

Jot is a quick-capture app for Windows: one hotkey, one line, back to what you were doing. What it is, or what is still unproven.