A free tier that isn't a lockout
A free tier that isn't a lockout
You start the month meaning to evaluate it properly. A daily portfolio brief at 7. A weekly research run on a sector you're watching. A standing summary of one long newsletter you never have time to read. For three weeks it's part of your morning, and then the trial clock runs out on a Tuesday you weren't thinking about it.
You know what usually happens next. The 7am brief doesn't arrive. You email the thing to ask why, and you get a wall: "Your trial has ended. Upgrade to continue." The work you set up is behind a paywall, and you're not even sure it's still there. So you let it lapse, because re-creating it from scratch later is its own small chore, and the tool quietly joins the pile of things you tried once.
We built the end of the trial to not feel like that.
The lockout is a choice, and we made the other one
Most products treat the trial-end moment as leverage. Cut access, surface the upgrade button, count on the friction of losing everything to push the card out of your wallet. It converts some people. It also burns the ones who liked the product but weren't ready that week, and it teaches everyone that starting a trial is a small risk.
When your 30-day Pro trial ends, Marvin doesn't lock the door. It steps you down to a real free tier and keeps being useful. Two things are true at once: you stop paying nothing changes about your access to Marvin as a place you can email, and the heavier standing work goes quiet until you decide it's worth turning back on.
What stays on: ask Marvin anything
The free tier is not a read-only museum of what you used to have. You can still email Marvin a question and get an answer back, the same way you would on day one. Forward a long post you don't have time to read and ask for the gist. Paste a passage and ask what it's actually claiming. Ask it to draft a reply you're stuck on.
To: marvin@ccmarvin.com
Hi Marvin,
Don't have time for this before my 2pm. What's the core argument, and is there anything in it I'd disagree with as an operator?
A couple of minutes later it comes back in the same thread:
From: Marvin marvin@ccmarvin.com
Hi Daniel,
Core argument: great work comes from choosing a problem you're honestly curious about, then following that curiosity past the point where most people stop. The essay's three moves are pick the field, get to the frontier, and notice the gaps everyone else walks past.
Where an operator might push back: it's written from the maker's chair, so it underweights the cost of switching fields late and says little about working inside constraints you didn't choose, which is most of an operator's life. The "just follow your curiosity" advice assumes a runway not everyone has.
Sincerely, Marvin
That keeps working after the trial, for free, with no card on file. The free tier runs on a lighter model than Pro, so the deepest analysis isn't identical, but for "tell me what this says and what to think about it," it's there when you need it.
What pauses: your standing work, kept exactly where you left it
The recurring jobs are the part that costs real compute every day, so those are what step down. Your scheduled briefs, your portfolio runs, your weekly research: they pause. The word that matters is pause. They are not deleted. The brief you spent three weeks tuning to surface exactly the four things you care about is sitting right where you left it, dormant, with all of its settings intact.
This is the part the lockout model gets wrong on purpose. It wants you to feel the loss. We'd rather you feel that the work is safe, because it is, and that picking it back up is a single sentence away.
Turning it back on is one reply
There's no re-onboarding. When you decide the standing work is worth it, you tell Marvin, and everything that paused comes back exactly as it was. No rebuilding the brief, no re-entering the portfolio, no "let's set you up again."
To: marvin@ccmarvin.com
Hi Marvin,
Ready to go back to Pro. Start my morning brief up again.
Your 7am brief is back the next morning, same shape it had the day the trial ended. We don't do win-back spam in the meantime either. You sit on the free tier as long as you like, and the upgrade is there when you reach for it, not nagging you when you haven't.
Honest limits
This isn't a way to get Pro for free, and we won't pretend it is. On the free tier the daily and weekly automation stays paused until you upgrade, and ad-hoc questions run on a lighter model than Pro, so the most demanding research and the standing briefs are genuinely a paid capability. What the free tier guarantees is narrower and, we think, more important: starting a trial is never a trap. The floor underneath it is a product that still answers you, with your real work preserved and one reply from running again.
How to try
Start the 30-day Pro trial with no credit card, set up the brief or the research run you've been meaning to automate, and use it for real. When the month is up, you'll land on a free tier that still works, with everything you built waiting. Email Marvin to begin:
To: marvin@ccmarvin.com
Hi Marvin,
Send me a brief every morning at 7 on the three or four things actually moving in semis, with a source on each.
If you ever want to know exactly where you stand: your plan, days left, what's on, just reply and ask. No dashboard to dig through.