Plans and billing

What Free, Pro and Studio include, how the 14-day trial works, and what happens to your settings if a plan lapses.

The three plans

Everything that makes a show work is on the free plan. What the paid plans add is the parts your audience sees.

Free No card: Your public page and the live meter, unlimited shows, polls, and show notes — with three segments a show and a week of analytics history.
Pro 14-day trial: Everything above with no segment limit, plus roll call, listener suggestions, custom branding, live video and chat, stream overlays, and your full analytics history.
Studio 14-day trial: Everything in Pro, plus sponsor placements and their click analytics, priority support, and early access to new features.

Current prices are on the pricing table itself — open Settings → Plan or any Upgrade button. Both paid plans bill monthly or yearly, and the yearly price is shown beside the monthly one so you can compare before choosing.

The 14-day trial

Both paid plans start with a 14-day free trial. You enter a card to begin it, nothing is charged until the trial ends, and cancelling before then costs nothing.

The trial is per account, not per plan. Starting one on Pro and switching to Studio does not restart it, and a second subscription after a cancellation begins billing straight away.
Closing the form partway through leaves no trace. Your plan is not created until your card is safely on file, so an abandoned checkout does not quietly start a trial or use one up.
No card, no charge — and no surprise. If the card is removed before the trial ends, the subscription simply stops rather than failing repeatedly.
Everything is live during the trial. A trial is not a limited preview: roll call runs, overlays go on air, and the shows you run in it keep their standings afterwards.

Upgrading, and what happens next

Every locked panel carries its own Upgrade button, and it opens checkout on the page you were already on. Pick a plan and a short card form appears — card number, expiry, security code and postal code, with your email already filled in, and Apple Pay or Google Pay above them if your device has one. Enter it, and the dialog confirms your plan and closes itself. The panel behind it is already working: no reload, and nothing to wait for.

SettingsPlan

Changing tier is one step. Moving between Pro and Studio happens in place and is prorated — there is no second checkout, and no gap where a feature stops working.
Cards, invoices and cancelling live with our payment provider. The Manage billingbutton on Settings → Plan opens their portal, which is where receipts, VAT details and the cancel control are. The card form is ours, but the fields inside it are Stripe's — HeatCheck never sees or stores your card number.

Upgrade mid-show if you need to

Nothing about checkout interrupts a live show. The feature you just paid for is available in the same minute — though a listener-facing feature that was off when you went live is switched on from the usual control, like any other.

Why a panel says “Part of Pro”

Locked features keep their place. The panel, its title and its position on your dashboard stay exactly where they are, and only the controls are replaced by a line saying what the feature does and one button. Nothing is hidden, so nothing is a surprise later.

Ads and overlays work differently on purpose

You can build, edit and preview a sponsor placement or a stream overlay on any plan. Neither is judgeable from a screenshot, so the builder stays open and the paid step is putting it in front of people.

Sponsor placements: Design and preview them freely. The activation switch — the one that puts a sponsor on your live page — is the Studio step.
Stream overlays: Build, arrange, preview at full size and edit as much as you like. The browser-source URL is the Pro step: on a free plan an overlay has no address to copy, so there is nothing to paste into OBS, Streamlabs or Streamyard. Upgrade and the URL appears immediately — see Stream overlays.

An overlay URL that was already on air keeps its shape

If a plan lapses while a browser source is live, that source paints a small card explaining the overlay is locked, rather than going blank. A blank source is indistinguishable from a wrong URL, a crashed scene, or a typo — and finding out which, mid-broadcast, is the worst version of this problem.

If a plan ends

Downgrading and cancelling are never destructive. Your branding, your ads, your overlays and every saved setting stay exactly as you left them — they are simply not served to an audience until the plan comes back, and everything returns as it was the moment it does.

A failed payment does not switch your show off. Cards fail for days before anything is final, and most retries succeed, so your features keep running while that plays out. You will see a notice on Settings → Plan.
A show already live keeps running. Roll call and listener suggestions are set up when you go live, so a plan that ends mid-show does not pull them out from under your audience.
Nothing is deleted. Roll-call standings, points, badges and past analytics all survive a lapse. Analytics simply shows the free plan’s window again, and says so above the figures.

Your public page never goes away

Your page, the live meter, voting, polls and show notes are on the free plan and stay available whatever happens to a subscription. A listener who has bookmarked your link always finds a working page there.

For listeners

Settings reference