Why We Killed the Trial and Launched a Free Plan
We replaced the 7-day trial with a permanent Free plan and rebuilt our tiers around how people actually use a streaming channel. Here is the thinking, including the parts that were uncomfortable.
The Trial Was Failing Everyone
Until this month, playout.video started every new account on a 7-day trial. On paper that's standard practice. In reality it worked badly, and the data said so plainly: most trials expired before the person had streamed anything meaningful.
A 24/7 channel is not a 7-day decision. The product's whole value is what happens over time: a playlist that loops all week, a calendar that runs your Sunday service without you, watch hours that compound on YouTube. Seven days is barely enough to collect your content, let alone see the channel work.
So people would sign up with a half-formed idea, poke around for an evening, get pulled away by life, and come back to an expired trial. The product never got to show what it does. That's not a conversion problem, that's a measurement problem: we were timing a marathon with a stopwatch.
What We Did Instead
Every account now starts on a permanent Free plan. No card, no clock.
Free gives you the entire production toolset: uploads, playlists, the composition editor, overlay templates, calendar building, Live Studio with 2 guests, and one live stream at 1080p30. The limits are on scale, not on capability: a watermark on output, 5 hours per session, one destination, 10GB of storage.
The line we drew is deliberate: building is free, running a serious channel is paid. You can take weeks to get your channel right on Free. When it's ready to run around the clock, unbranded, on multiple platforms, that's when a subscription starts making sense, and by then you know exactly what you're paying for.
Tiers That Match How People Stream
At the same time we rebuilt the paid tiers. The old model had four plans that differed only in resolution and frame rate. But when we looked at our actual customers, resolution was almost never the thing that separated them. What separated them was how they run their channel:
Some loop a library 24/7 and jump in live occasionally. That's Creator ($19/mo billed annually): a persistent unbranded channel, multistreaming, studio, recordings.
Some program their channel like a TV station: shows at fixed times, auto start and stop, playlist swaps on a calendar. That's Channel ($39/mo), and it's the plan we think most serious channels end up on.
Some need the stream on their own website, under their own brand, with adaptive quality for whoever shows up. That's Business ($119/mo).
Quality became what it always really was: an add-on. 60fps is +$10/mo, 4K is +$40/mo, on the tiers whose infrastructure supports them.
The Uncomfortable Parts
Two decisions here were genuinely hard.
The watermark. Free output carries a playout.video watermark. We know nobody loves watermarks. But a free tier with unbranded, unlimited output is indistinguishable from a paid tier, and the free tier has to be paid for somehow. The watermark is the honest trade: it's also, frankly, how new creators find us.
Gating calendar runs. On Free and Creator you can build calendar schedules but not run them. Automation that streams for you, on schedule, unattended, is the most operationally expensive thing we do, and it's the core of the Channel tier. We kept building free on every plan so you never have to pay to find out whether the workflow fits you.
If You Were Already Paying
Existing $29 subscribers are grandfathered onto the Channel tier: everything you had, including calendar automation, at the price you were paying. Loyalty should be rewarded, not repriced.
What Happens Next
Free-plan accounts are already live, and the new tiers are on the pricing page. If you've been sitting on an expired trial from months ago: log back in. Your workspace is a Free workspace now, your content is still there, and the clock is gone.