What you get on Free

Summary#

A Free account is a real account with no expiry and no card. It gives you the ten technical SEO tools that cost zero credits, the two browser-based image tools, one seat, and full access to the interface so you can see everything the platform does. What it does not give you is credits, and every research, competitive, AI-visibility and content tool spends credits. This page lists exactly what runs and what does not, so you can decide whether to upgrade before you hit a wall.

Purpose#

Most trial accounts work by rationing: a handful of runs, then a locked door. That makes it impossible to judge a product, because you spend the trial being careful instead of being useful.

Metric Vault takes the opposite approach. The tools that cost us nothing to run, the direct technical checks against your own pages, are free forever and unmetered. There is no run counter on them and no expiry. The tools that cost us money on every run, because they pull live search data or call an AI model, are the ones behind a plan. That line is drawn by real cost, not by artificial scarcity.

Overview#

Your plan carries a monthly credit allowance. A credit is spent when you run a tool that has a cost. Free has an allowance of 0 credits, so any tool priced above zero is blocked with this message:

This tool needs a paid plan. Free includes the 10 technical SEO tools;
upgrade to Pro to unlock the rest.

Everything priced at zero runs normally, every day, with no counter. See How credits work for how the credit system works across all plans.

What runs on Free#

The ten zero-credit technical SEO tools. All of them live in the Site Health section, except where noted. Each fetches your page or file directly and grades what it finds.

The last four run together from Site Health → Advanced Technical Checks, which executes all of them against one URL in a single pass.

The Technical SEO workflow. In Get Started → Technical SEO, the button reads Run Full Tech Audit · FREE. It fires all ten checks above in parallel against one domain and returns one consolidated report. This is the fastest way to see what a Free account can do.

The two image tools. Image Tools → Image Resize and Image Tools → Image Reformat run entirely inside your browser. Nothing is uploaded and no credits are involved, on any plan.

Everything you can see. The full sidebar, every tool page, every in-app explainer, the Library, exports on the results you can produce, and the Ctrl+K command palette all work on Free. Nothing is hidden from view.

The public free tools. Eleven tool pages under /free-tools/ need no account at all, not even a Free one. See Free tools, no account needed.

What does not run on Free#

Anything with a credit cost in its run button, which is most of the platform. That includes:

• All keyword research, including Keyword Explorer, Keyword Overview and Gap Finder
• All competitor and backlink tools, including Domain Overview and Backlink Profile
• All AI Visibility tools
• All content generation, optimization and trust-check tools
• All Promote tools
• Rank Tracker and the scheduled-report workflows
• The 8-Second Quick Preview on the home screen, which runs a full Domain Overview
• Get Recommendations, the action-plan panel under each result, which requires the Pro plan or above

Team invites are also unavailable: Free has zero invitable seats, so the workspace is one person. See Seats and plan limits.

How it works#

The gate is applied on our servers, before any provider is called, so you cannot accidentally spend money you do not have.

1. You press a run button. The request carries the tool's type and your email.
2. The server looks up the tool's price. Zero-cost tools skip the quota check entirely and are allowed through, even for a signed-out visitor on a public free tool page.
3. For anything priced above zero, the server resolves your plan. On Free, the run is refused with a 403 and the upgrade message quoted above. Nothing is charged, nothing is logged as usage, and no provider call is made.
4. On a paid plan the run continues, and the credit is recorded only after a real result comes back.

There is one shared protection that applies on every plan, including Free: a fair-use ceiling of 100 light-tool calls per hour. It exists to stop automated abuse and is far above normal human use. If you cross it you see:

Hourly fair-use limit reached (100 light-tool calls/hour). This protects our
infrastructure from abuse while keeping your monthly usage unlimited. Please
wait ~<N> minutes for the next hourly reset.

The counter clears at the top of each hour, in UTC.

Moving off Free#

Upgrading is immediate and self-serve. Open Account & Team → Account, find the Subscription card, and press Upgrade. You will see a plain summary of what changes before anything is charged, then a Stripe checkout page. Paid plans start with a 14-day free trial for first-time customers.

The first paid tier with credits is Starter at 100 credits per month. Pro at 500 credits per month is the first tier that includes Get Recommendations, team seats, white-label report branding, and scheduled reports. Plans and pricing lists every tier, and Subscribing and checkout walks through the purchase.

Your Free account is not reset by upgrading. Everything already in your Library stays there.