Why everything is free
The line on our front page is: Studying is free forever. The AI costs us money to run, so heavy use of it is what you pay for. People ask whether that is a launch offer. It is not. This post is the arithmetic behind it.
Who is writing this
I work in cybersecurity by day and tutor special needs kids on the side, in Singapore. Versed started as the set of tools I wanted for my own students: a quiz game that did not put the reports behind a paywall, a study room that did not need a subscription, a grade calculator without a cookie wall. I kept running into the same pattern, a tool that was free when a teacher recommended it and paid by the time the student needed it. So the rule for Versed is simple: if it was free when you started, it stays free.
Most of it costs almost nothing
A live game in Versed Play runs in one small object on Cloudflare's edge for the length of the lesson and is deleted after. Your slides are rendered in your own browser and never uploaded. Study rooms are the same: a room is a few kilobytes of state that is wiped six hours after the last person leaves. The tools run entirely on your device; the PDF toolkit, the maths stepper, the writing checker and the reader do not talk to a server at all once the page has loaded. Serving a page costs a fraction of a cent, and most days the whole suite costs less to run than one coffee.
There is no database of students. No accounts on Play, Study or the tools. The only account anywhere is optional, in Learn and Teach, and only so your own data follows you between devices. Nothing is sold, and no student will ever be asked for a card.
The one thing that costs real money
Every time you ask the AI something, a model runs for a second or two on a GPU we pay for. One message in Ask is a fraction of a cent. One generated quiz set, one worksheet from a photo, one drafted progress narrative: each is a little more. Individually trivial, but ten thousand students each asking twenty questions a day is not, and there is no way to make that free for everyone without either showing ads or shutting it off when the budget runs out.
We chose neither. Instead every AI feature has a free daily allowance and hard caps: 20 messages a day in Ask (shared with tiny steps), 5 generated sets a day in the Play maker, 5 AI decks a month in Learn, 20 drafts and 3 worksheets a day in Teach, with a little more on a free account. When the site-wide budget for the day is spent, the AI says "back tomorrow" rather than billing on, and the hand-off buttons pass the same prompt to whichever AI you already have.
What the paid plans are for
Versed Plus, at $9.99 a month or $59 a year, is one larger AI pool across the whole suite, the faster model, study plans and reports, translating any set, and no strip at the bottom of the page. Versed Pro, at $14.99 a month or $99 a year, adds the things a school wants: your school's name and crest on the big screen, a class roster, printable per-question reports, 200 drafts a day in Teach and worksheets with answer keys. Nothing in either plan used to be free. Everything that was free the day you found it is still free today, and the plans exist so that a teacher who leans on the AI all day is the one paying for the GPU, not the student who asked one question.
The strip at the bottom
You will see one small line at the bottom of some pages. Most of the time it credits the pixel artists whose cats, rooms and furniture you are looking at; occasionally it is a paid slot. It is one line, it is never about us, and it never tracks you. Plus removes it, not because it is annoying but because it is the one thing we could offer that costs us nothing to take away.
What will never be paid
- Hosting a game, joining one, and the results.
- Study rooms, the shared timer and the cork board.
- Every tool: grades, calculator, maths steps, PDF, citations, reader, read aloud, formulas, exam countdown, tiny steps.
- Flashcards, spaced repetition, importing and sharing decks in Learn.
- The student tracker, accommodation log, goals and printed records in Teach.
If one of those ever moves behind a plan, this page will say so first, and you will be right to be annoyed. Until then: the plans page has the numbers, and the "What should we build?" link in every footer is where the next free thing comes from.