What is available
A FREE account now opens the Studio. The same Studio PRO and MAX use, with FREE's limits: one camera, 720p, 30 frames a second.
No watermark. No time limit. A FREE Sunday is a real Sunday.
What changes, and why I owe you this one
I need to be straight about how this came about.
For some time, the pricing page, the home page and the FAQ all described FREE as a working production tier. It had ticks against switching, streaming, recording, lyrics, Bible passages, and more. It read like something you could run a small service on.
The Studio itself did not agree. A FREE account signing in was sent back to the dashboard with an upgrade prompt. The website was selling something the code refused.
I found this in an audit of my own public pages against the code, line by line, which is something I now do on purpose. No bad intent behind it. The page described the plan; the gate was left from an earlier arrangement. But intent does not matter much to someone who signed up because of a tick on a pricing page and then could not get in.
There were two ways to fix it: change the page, or change the code. Every FREE limit and every per-feature gate already existed in the code, working. The only thing missing was the front door. So I opened the door.
What FREE includes
The pricing page is the full list, but in plain words, a FREE account can:
- Switch a camera from a phone, a USB or HDMI capture device, or an NDI source.
- Put lyrics, Bible passages and presenter decks on the projector, with themes and layered backgrounds.
- Stream to YouTube Live or Facebook Live.
- Record at 720p.
- Send NDI out to another computer.
- Add a lower third, a logo, a clock and a timer.
What stays with PRO and above: more cameras, higher resolution and frame rate, streaming to two places at once, hardware encoding, lip-sync calibration and more. MAX adds the multi-screen and multi-room features. The pricing page marks each one honestly, and the Studio enforces exactly what the page says.
Who benefits
Small churches with no software budget. One phone and a laptop can run a real Sunday.
Anyone deciding whether to trust this. You can run an actual service before paying anything. That tells you more than any article I could write.
The volunteer asked to "look into it". You can try it on the laptop you already have, tonight, without asking anyone for a card.
Being straight about the limits
One camera is one camera. You can switch sources, but only one is live at a time. If your service needs a wide shot and a close shot, that is PRO.
720p at 30 frames a second is the ceiling. It looks fine on a phone and a projector. It is not what you want on a large screen.
Some features you may expect are not in FREE. Stage monitors, Floor Director, Plan Remote and the multi-display Output Matrix are MAX features. The pricing page says so.
It still asks something of your hardware. Free software on a very old laptop will still run like a very old laptop.
What I learned
Pages drift from code. A price changes, a tier moves, a feature grows, and somewhere a sentence still describes last month. The only thing that catches it is checking, on purpose, against the code, not against my memory of it.
Memory is exactly what was wrong here.
Practical notes
Sign in and open the Studio. If you are on FREE and saw an upgrade prompt before, it should now let you through.
Start with one phone. Scan the camera QR with it, and you are rolling.
Run a rehearsal before a real service. Your first Sunday should not be your first try.
Upgrade when you feel a limit, not before. That is the whole point of FREE being real.
Available now.