Clipy no longer has a free trial. As of this week, there is a free plan and there is Clipy Pro, and nothing in between. If you upgrade, your card is charged that day.

That is a real change in how we ask people for money, so it deserves a real explanation rather than a changelog line. Here is the whole thinking, including the parts that are awkward.

TL;DR

  • The free trial is gone. There is no more "start your free month" anywhere in Clipy.
  • The free plan stays, and it is genuinely useful. Recording, sharing, transcripts, summaries, key moments, the agent-readable document on every link, and the MCP server are all free, with no card and no time limit.
  • Pro is $9 a month, or $72 a year which works out to $6 a month. When you upgrade, you are charged that day.
  • If you are already on a trial, nothing breaks. Your trial runs to its end date exactly as it would have.
  • We crossed 100,000 people using Clipy every month. Supporting that properly, and building the things paying users actually ask for, is what this change funds.
  • If the price is the problem, write to us. We would rather give you a discount than lose you over $9.

The honest reason, first

Clipy started as a small thing that solved one annoyance: screen recorders that made the person watching your video create an account. We built the opposite of that, gave it away, and it grew.

It is not a small thing any more. It is a browser recorder, a Chrome extension, a Mac app, a transcription and summarisation pipeline, a key-moments extractor that finds the exact frame you pointed at, a CLI, an MCP server that plugs your recordings into Claude Code and Cursor and Codex, a Loom migration path, and a hosted video platform underneath all of it. That is a real product with real running costs and a real support load.

For a long time we ran it as though the free tier was the whole point and paying users were a nice side effect. That was the right call when we were figuring out whether anyone wanted this. It is the wrong call now, because it quietly makes the people who pay us the lowest priority in the building. They are the smallest group, they are the least likely to complain loudly, and their money was funding a product roadmap aimed mostly at people who would never pay.

We want to invert that. The people paying for Clipy should get the best features, the fastest support, and the clearest sense that their money is buying something that keeps getting better. That is not a philosophical position, it is just what a product owes the people funding it.

Why the trial specifically had to go

You could reasonably ask why removing a free trial helps any of that. A trial is supposed to convert people, not cost you anything. Here is what it was actually doing to us.

Our free plan was already the trial

This is the part that decided it. A free trial exists to let you evaluate a product before paying. But you can already evaluate Clipy completely without paying, and without entering a card. You can record for as long as you like, share the link, get a transcript and a summary, and hand the whole thing to your coding agent. Nothing is watermarked, nothing expires, and nobody watching your video has to sign up.

So the trial was not letting anyone evaluate something they otherwise could not. It was doing something narrower: it was handing out a month of the paid tier to people who had already decided to enter a card. That is a discount, not an evaluation period, and it is a discount we were giving to exactly the people who were most ready to buy.

It created a state where you thought you had paid, and we disagreed

This is the part I am least proud of. If you started a trial on the annual plan, you picked a plan, you entered a card, and every reasonable reading of that is "I am a paying customer now". Your profile even said Clipy Pro.

But some paid features check whether money has actually moved, not whether a subscription exists. Whole-library Loom migration was one of them. So a person could subscribe, enter a card, go to migrate their Loom library, and get refused by the exact feature the trial was meant to sell them. We had support tickets from people in precisely that position, and they were right to be annoyed. In their words: "I bought the paid pro plan." From where they sat, they had.

We could have fixed that by making the trial unlock everything. But then a trial is a genuinely free month of the full product handed to anyone with a card, on a product whose free tier is already generous, and the maths stops working. Every path out of that intermediate state was worse than not having the state at all.

It made our pricing dishonest at the edges

Once you have a trial, every button in the product wants to say "free". Start your free month. Try Pro free. Claim your free trial. We had that copy in the header, the pricing page, the Loom tools, the extension, and the upgrade prompts.

The trouble with that much "free" is that it stops being a description of the offer and becomes the offer. We were selling a free month rather than selling Clipy, and a product that leads with "free" trains everyone, including us, to treat the paid thing as an afterthought.

It was costing us the argument for building anything

There is a quieter problem with running a product mostly for people who do not pay. Every roadmap discussion ends up weighing "this would help a lot of users" against "this would help the users funding us", and when the first group is a hundred times larger, the first group always wins. That sounds democratic. In practice it means the people who trusted you with a card watch their requests lose every single time.

Password-protected links is the clearest example. It is one of the most requested things we do not have, it comes almost entirely from people using Clipy for work, and it has been sitting behind more broadly-useful work for months. That ordering was defensible under the old model and is not defensible under this one.

What 100,000 people a month actually means for us

More than 100,000 people use Clipy every month now. That number is nice to write in a blog post and considerably less nice to operate.

Every one of those recordings is bytes we store, transcode, transcribe, summarise, and serve. The transcription runs on our own hardware, which we did specifically to keep costs sane. The summaries and the ask-the-video answers run through models we pay for per token. The videos are stored and delivered on a CDN we pay for per gigabyte. None of that scales down when a user is on the free plan.

The bigger cost is not infrastructure though, it is attention. Support requests scale with users. Bug reports scale with users. Edge cases in screen capture across three operating systems, four browsers, and every possible monitor configuration scale with users, and they scale faster than linearly because the weird setups only show up once you have enough people.

Right now, someone who pays us $9 a month and someone who has never paid us anything get the same support queue. That is not sustainable, and more importantly it is not fair to the person paying. Part of what this change buys is the ability to say that paying customers get answered first, and to actually mean it.

What is still free, specifically

I want to be precise here, because "we removed the trial" is easy to misread as "we took things away". We did not take anything away from the free plan. It is exactly what it was yesterday.

On the free plan, with no card:

  • Record your screen, a window, a tab, or your camera, from the browser, the Chrome extension, or the Mac app. There is no time limit on a recording.
  • No watermark on anything, ever. That is a promise we made publicly and we are not touching it.
  • Share a link that anyone can watch without creating an account. No signup wall for your viewers.
  • Automatic transcripts with timestamps, AI titles, and summaries.
  • Key moments: the specific instants where you pointed at something, with the video frame extracted and, on Mac and extension recordings, the real click coordinates fused in.
  • The agent-readable document on every recording. Add .md to any Clipy link and an AI agent reads the summary, the key moments with their frames, and the full transcript.
  • The MCP server and the CLI, so Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, and other MCP clients can read your library and record on their own. Minting an API key does not require Pro.
  • Ask-the-video Q&A on any recording.
  • Search across your whole library, including inside what was said.
  • Your first five Loom videos migrated across, one at a time, keeping their titles and getting their own Clipy links.
  • Recordings up to 1080p.

That is not a crippled demo. For a lot of people it is the entire product, and those people are welcome to stay on it indefinitely. We are not going to start nagging you into a plan you do not need.

What Pro actually adds

Equally precise, because I would rather undersell this than have you upgrade for something that is not there.

  • Recording above 1080p. Free caps at 1080p. Pro unlocks 1440p and 4K. If you record a Retina display or you are producing anything people will watch full screen, this is the difference you will actually see.
  • Whole-library Loom migration. Moving more than one video at a time, and the CSV route that handles up to a thousand links in an assisted run. This is the one that costs us the most to run and it is squarely a Pro feature. Single migrations stay free up to five.
  • Call-to-action buttons on your videos. Add a button under the player and at the end of the video, pointing wherever you want.
  • Priority support. Your ticket goes to the front of the queue. This was always meant to be part of Pro. What changes now is that we can actually staff it, which is most of the point of this post.
  • New features first. Pro users get things as they land rather than after they have settled.

Pro is $9 a month, or $72 for a year which is $6 a month and 33% cheaper. Both are on the pricing page. You can cancel from the billing portal at any time and you keep access through the period you already paid for.

What the money is going into

Saying "we need revenue to build better things" is easy and slightly meaningless without specifics, so here is what is actually on the list.

Recording memory. This is the big one. Every recording you make is already transcribed, summarised, and indexed. The obvious next step is being able to ask questions across all of it, not one video at a time. "Find me the recording where we discussed the pricing change" should just work, and the answer should link you to the right second of the right video. The foundations are already shipped: cross-transcript search exists today, and searching inside recordings lands you on the exact moment. Turning that into something conversational across your entire library is the thing we most want to build next.

Better support, properly staffed. Not a chatbot. Actual responses from people who can read your recording and tell you what went wrong.

Chapters and navigation. Automatic chapter markers on the player, generated from the transcript we already have.

Password protection and link expiry. Some recordings should not be "anyone with the link" forever, and right now that is the only option we give you.

Comments and reactions with timestamps. Being able to reply to a specific moment rather than the video as a whole.

Depth on the agent side. Clipy is the screen recorder your AI agents can read, and that is where we are genuinely different from everyone else in this category. There is a lot more to do: richer context documents, better click resolution, tighter integration with the tools people actually run.

Captions on the player. We generate a timestamped transcript for every recording and we do not yet turn it into a caption track. That is an accessibility gap with no good excuse, and the data to fix it already exists.

A real library at scale. Once you have a few hundred recordings, a grid of thumbnails stops being a library and starts being a wall. You can already hover a card to preview it and multi-select to delete in bulk. What is missing is a list view, moving a selection into a folder or tagging it in one go, and folders that behave the way you expect folders to.

None of that gets built by a product whose entire business model is "hopefully some of these 100,000 people pay us eventually". These are weeks of focused work each, and focused work is the thing a free-tier-funded product can never quite justify.

If you are on a trial right now

Nothing happens to you. Your trial runs to its end date and converts exactly as it was always going to. We did not cancel anyone's trial to make this change, and we did not charge anyone early.

Two small things did improve for you. Your profile now says "Trial" next to Clipy Pro, so there is no longer a state where the product says one thing and a paid feature says another. And if you want to start your plan early, for instance because you want to migrate your Loom library now rather than in three weeks, there is a button on your profile that does exactly that. Same price, same card, just billed today.

If the price is a problem, tell us

This is not a throwaway line at the end of a pricing post. I mean it literally.

Clipy is $9 a month, which is deliberately a fraction of what the incumbents charge for a comparable plan with AI. But $9 means different things in different places and to different people. If you are a student, if you are in a country where that converts to real money, if you are a solo founder counting every subscription, if you are a non-profit, or if you just think the price is wrong for what you personally use, write to us.

We would genuinely rather give you a discount than lose you. We have discretion on pricing and we use it. The worst outcome for us is someone who finds Clipy useful, quietly hits a wall, and leaves without ever telling us the price was the reason.

Reach us through the contact form, or reply to any email we have sent you. A real person reads it.

The same goes for anything else. If a feature you were counting on turns out to be behind Pro and you think that is the wrong call, say so. We have moved things back and forth based on that kind of feedback before.

What this means for you, specifically

If you use Clipy occasionally to send someone a clip. Nothing changes and nothing will. You never needed Pro and you still do not. Record, share, done.

If you use Clipy for bug reports and hand recordings to a coding agent. Also nothing changes. The agent-readable document, the key moments with click coordinates, the MCP server and the CLI are all free and are staying free. That is the part of Clipy we most want people using, and putting it behind a paywall would be self-defeating.

If you record for an audience. You probably want Pro, mostly for recording above 1080p. A 1080p recording of a Retina display looks soft in a way people notice even when they cannot name it.

If you are moving off Loom. Your first five come across free. Past that, whole-library migration is a Pro feature, and it is the one place where our costs scale directly with what you are asking for. We are downloading, re-encoding, transcribing, and hosting your entire back catalogue. The Loom downloader itself stays free and ungated, with no account needed, and we have no plans to change that.

If you were planning to start a trial today. Start on the free plan instead. It is not a countdown and nobody is going to email you about it expiring. Upgrade when you actually hit a wall, and if the wall turns out to be in a strange place, tell us and we will look at where we put it.

What we are not doing

Since posts like this often precede a slow squeeze, here is what is not on the table.

We are not adding a watermark to free recordings. This was the founding promise of the product and it is not up for discussion.

We are not adding a signup wall for viewers. The person you send a link to will never have to make an account to watch it. That was the original reason Clipy exists.

We are not putting a recording time limit on the free plan. No five-minute cap. That is the thing everyone hates about the alternatives.

We are not going to start deleting your videos to pressure an upgrade. Your library keeps working.

We are not selling your recordings or training models on them. Your recordings are processed to produce your transcript, summary, and key moments, and that is where it ends. This is written down in the Clipy Pledge and this change does not touch it.

The shape of the argument, if you want the short version

Products with a genuinely usable free tier do not generally run a separate free trial on top of it. Cap does not. Descript does not. The products that do run trials tend to be the ones with no free tier at all, where the trial is the only way in, which is a completely reasonable thing to do when you have no other front door.

We were in the first group and behaving like the second, and it produced a confusing middle state that generated support tickets, sold a discount to people who were already convinced, and made every surface of the product shout "free" at the expense of explaining what Clipy is. If you want the longer version of how we think about this category, we wrote up the ranked list of Loom alternatives including the ones we lose to.

So: free plan, real and permanent. Pro, paid from day one, with the features and the support that money should buy. And a direct line to us if the number is wrong for you.

Common questions

Is Clipy still free?

Yes, and the free plan did not change. Recording, sharing, transcripts, summaries, key moments, the agent-readable document, and the MCP server are all free with no card and no time limit. What went away is the separate free month of the paid tier.

I was about to start a trial. What happens now?

Use the free plan for as long as you want. It is not a countdown. When you hit something you need Pro for, upgrade then.

Not without telling you. Some of those links still exist in older emails and in versions of our Chrome extension that have not updated yet. If you land on checkout through one of them, you get a notice explaining the trial is gone and exactly what will be charged today, and nothing happens until you click through it.

What happens to my recordings if I do not upgrade?

They stay. Your library and every share link you have already sent keep working.

Do you offer refunds?

If you upgrade and it turns out Clipy is not what you needed, write to us. We are not going to argue with you over $9.

Is there a team or enterprise plan?

Enterprise is sales-led right now, and covers assisted Loom migration, volume pricing, onboarding, and security or procurement review. Get in touch through the contact form and we will work it out with you.

Why should I pay for this rather than Loom?

Mostly price and mostly agents. Loom's Business plan with AI is $24 per user per month billed monthly. Clipy Pro is $9 a month, or $6 a month billed yearly, for a product with AI built in, no video caps, no time limits, and no signup wall for the people watching. And Clipy produces a document your coding agent can read directly, which as far as we know none of the incumbents do. If you are coming from Loom, the migration path is here.

If you have read this far and you are annoyed about the change, I would rather hear it than not. Tell us.