Free Plan and Trials

Two facts up front, because both are routinely got the wrong way round. A new workspace starts on Free — not on a trial, not on a countdown, not on a plan that will lapse. And a trial begins only when you choose a paid plan at checkout, which means a trial is something you opt into rather than something you are placed on and have to escape.

Everything else on this page follows from those two. Free is a destination; a trial is a paid subscription with a 14-day grace period in front of the first charge.

What Free actually includes

Free is enough to run a real documentation site in public, on your own domain, with your whole team in it. Unlimited users, unlimited pages and templates, the full editor including real-time collaboration and AI authoring, the Leed Assistant, lead-capture forms, the menu builder, the standard themes and all three documentation layouts, page scheduling, per-page access overrides, aggregate analytics on a rolling 30-day window, 250 identified contacts, and both MCP services.

None of that is a demo mode. There is no watermark on your content, no cap on collaborators, no restriction on the domain you publish to, and no expiry.

MCP is free

The Operator MCP, the Docs MCP, WebMCP and the A2A agent card are available on every plan, including Free. Your team can connect their own AI clients to a Free workspace and author with them; your readers’ AI clients can reach your published documentation the same way they would on any other plan.

That is worth stating plainly because it has been documented the other way round in the past. There is no paid-plan requirement on any MCP surface, no MCP tier badge anywhere in this documentation set, and no “requires a paid plan” refusal at connect time for a Free workspace. AI in Leed indexes all five AI surfaces, and none of them carries a plan minimum.

What Free does not include

Seven things, and they cluster: Free gives you publishing and gives you capture, and holds back the audience and marketing machinery on top.

There is no marketing email at all — the allowance is zero, so the send surface is gated rather than metered. Reader-level history is withheld: a contact’s profile loads and its timeline comes back empty, even though the events are being recorded the whole time. Transcripts and extracted document text are generated and stored but not returned. Live documentation search is off, and your site ships the static search index instead, so readers still get search without live results. Auto-linking is skipped when your site builds. Analytics reach back 30 days. And your documentation footer carries a link back to Leed.

The 250-contact allowance behaves as a visibility cap rather than a capture block, which is a distinction worth understanding before you run a campaign against it — Usage and limits has the mechanics.

The footer badge

This is the one Free consequence your readers can see. A Free documentation footer renders a Powered by Leed link where a paid site renders your copyright line.

Overriding the footer template does not remove it, because the override slot itself requires Starter: the ejectable documentation header and footer templates are gated at the same rung, so a Free workspace cannot replace the footer that carries the badge. The two gates are the same decision expressed twice, and they interlock deliberately. Documentation header, footer and logos covers the footer and the slots around it, on both sides of that line.

How a trial starts

A trial starts at checkout, and only at checkout.

sequenceDiagram
    autonumber
    participant Y as You
    participant L as Leed
    participant LS as Lemon Squeezy
    participant W as Your workspace
    Y->>L: Choose a paid plan on Settings → Plans & billing
    L->>L: Has this workspace trialled this plan before?
    L->>LS: Request a checkout link<br/>(strip the free trial if it has)
    LS-->>Y: Hosted checkout — your card is collected
    Y->>LS: Confirm
    LS->>L: Subscription created, status on_trial
    L->>W: Grant the plan's entitlements AND record<br/>the plan as trialled — one single write
    Note over W: 14 days at the plan's full entitlements
    LS->>LS: Trial ends — charge the card
    LS->>L: Subscription updated, status active
    L->>W: Entitlements unchanged, status now Active

The two things worth taking from that diagram are on the same line. The grant of entitlements and the recording of “this workspace has now trialled this plan” happen in one write, as a side effect of the webhook that reports the trial. There is no window in which you hold the plan without the trial being recorded, and no path that grants the plan and forgets.

Your card is collected at the start, not at the end. The 14 days are configured on the plan itself rather than chosen per checkout, so every paid plan trials for the same length — 14 days today.

One trial per plan, ever

Leed records which plans a workspace has trialled and never offers a second trial for the same plan. The record is permanent — there is no reset, no expiry on the record, and no path that clears it.

The consequences are the part that surprises people:

• Trial Starter, cancel, come back a year later and choose Starter again. You are charged immediately. The checkout is created without a trial, because Starter is already on the record.
• Trial Starter, then switch to Growth mid-trial. Both plans are now recorded as trialled — the switch stamps the new plan too. A later Growth checkout also skips the trial.
• Buying a plan outright never burns its trial. The record is written from the trial status specifically, so a workspace that goes straight to paid without trialling still has its trial available for that plan.

While you are on a trial

You have the trialled plan’s full entitlements for the whole trial, quotas included. A Growth trial is 10,000 contacts and 50,000 marketing emails a month, not a reduced trial allowance.

Switching plans mid-trial does not end the trial and does not bill you immediately. Leed changes the plan on the existing subscription and deliberately does not invoice — the first charge still lands at trial end, at the new plan’s price. (The same switch on an already-active subscription does invoice immediately; the mid-trial case is the exception.)

Ending a trial before it charges

Cancel from the Subscription panel on Settings → Plans & billing. A trial subscription is cancelable in exactly the same way an active one is, and this is the supported way to leave before the first charge.

The panel shows the Status row with a gray Trial badge, the Plan row naming the plan you are trialling, and a Renews row carrying the date the trial ends — which is also the date you would be charged. Both Manage subscription and the red Cancel button are available throughout.

The full cancellation flow, including what the confirmation asks you and what happens to the subscription afterwards, is in Managing your subscription. If a charge has already landed, Invoices and payments is where you will find it.

What happens when a trial or subscription ends

The workspace returns to Free entitlements. It does not become read-only, it is not suspended, and nothing is deleted.

Concretely: contacts beyond 250 lock rather than disappear, and unlock instantly if you upgrade again. Analytics history is still stored in full and sits outside the 30-day query window. Transcripts and extracted document text stay stored and are withheld from responses rather than discarded. Content-type and label overrides you created while paying keep working — you can no longer create new ones, but you can still read and remove the ones you have. Distribution channels you configured stay readable and can still be switched off and deleted. And the Powered by Leed link comes back to your documentation footer at the next build.

Canceling does not take effect immediately: your entitlements continue to the end of the period you have paid for, and only then does the workspace drop to Free. What survives, locks or stops at each boundary is set out in full in Changing plans and downgrades, and a complete accounting of what Free gates and how each gate behaves is in Feature Availability by Plan.