Pricing we don't hate: Free, Ad-free, Credit Pack, Pro
Four plans, no everything-or-nothing freemium trap. The free tier is a real product. The paid tiers solve specific problems. And nothing is bundled together that doesn't belong together.
There are two pricing models that dominate web tools and both of them are bad.
The first is the everything-or-nothing freemium. You get a crippled version free, and the moment you hit any real-use case, the entire product locks behind a $20/month subscription. The free tier is a sales funnel, not a product.
The second is the bundle-of-nine-things subscription. You wanted one feature; you're paying for eight you'll never touch. The pricing page promises "AI-powered analytics, advanced exports, priority support, mobile app, dark mode, custom themes…" and you just wanted to remove ads.
ManaScry's pricing has four plans. Each one solves exactly one problem. Nothing is bundled with anything that doesn't belong together. Here it is.
The four plans
| Plan | Ads | AI tools | Cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | yes | no | $0 forever |
| Ad-free | no | no | $4.99 once |
| Credit Pack | yes | yes (200 generation credits) | $9.99 once |
| Pro | no | yes (monthly credit grant + topup-able) | $4.99/mo or $49/yr |
That's the whole thing.
Free is a real product
Most "free tier" pricing pages have a 12-row feature comparison table where the free column is mostly red Xs. Ours is a green checkmark column with one X.
On the free tier, you get:
- Full collection tracking — unlimited cards, unlimited foil/condition variants
- Unlimited decks, lists, wishlists, proxies
- Daily price sync from Scryfall + Card Kingdom
- Cost basis, market value, gains/losses, set completion
- Public deck sharing
- Bulk import from Moxfield, Archidekt, TappedOut, ManaBox CSV
- Print-ready proxy queue
- Format-aware deck legality
- Goldfish playtest
You also get ads. That's the only thing. There is no usage cap, no card-count cap, no deck-count cap. The free tier is the product.
We can do this because the cost of running ManaScry per free user is small enough that ads cover it, and because we'd rather have a million free users using a real product than a hundred trial users fumbling with a demo.
We've seen tools paywall things like "more than 10 decks" or "more than 500 cards in collection" or "exports." We don't, and we won't. If a feature works, it works for everyone. The only thing the free tier doesn't have is ad-free + AI generation tools. Those exist behind separate, optional paywalls.
Ad-free is a one-time purchase, not a subscription
A lot of products bundle "remove ads" into their subscription tier. We don't.
Ads pay for the free tier. If you don't want to see them, you pay us once — $4.99, lifetime — and we stop showing them. You don't have to subscribe to anything. You don't have to renew anything. You bought the right to not see ads, and that right is yours forever.
We made this a one-time purchase deliberately, even though every business advisor in the world will tell you to make it a subscription. Subscriptions print money. They also breed resentment, because a $4.99/month "remove ads" subscription will, over five years, cost you $300 to remove a thing you shouldn't have had to pay anything for in the first place. That's not a trade we want to ask people to make.
Credit Pack is for people who want AI without the rest
Some users want the generation tools (deck builder suggestions, collection chat, precon upgrade analysis) but don't care about ad removal and don't want a subscription. The Credit Pack is for them.
$9.99 buys you 200 generation credits. Each credit is one AI request — a deck generation, a chat message, an analyze-deck call, etc. Credits don't expire. You burn through them at your own pace.
When you run out, you can buy another pack, or upgrade to Pro, or stop. The product still works completely without AI; the surfaces just disappear from your view.
We wrote a separate post about why AI features are off by default. The short version: free-tier users see no AI surfaces at all. Paid AI is opt-in only.
Pro is the bundle
Pro is $4.99/month or $49/year and it's a real subscription that makes sense to subscribe to.
- Ad-free across the entire app
- A monthly grant of generation credits (resets each renewal)
- Top-up-able with Credit Packs when you exhaust the monthly grant
- Advanced analytics dashboards
- Earliest access to new features
- Priority support
If you want both ad-free and generation tools, Pro is cheaper than buying Ad-free + a Credit Pack a few months in a row. It's the bundle for people who actually want both things. If you only want one, the standalone purchases exist.
$49/year vs. $4.99/month works out to two free months for paying yearly. We're not marking up monthly to make yearly look better. We're not running a "limited time" sale that's actually permanent. The discount exists because annual users are easier on our infrastructure (no monthly churn paperwork, no monthly Stripe fees) and we pass some of that back.
What's not bundled
The reverse decision matters as much as the forward one. Things we deliberately did not bundle into Pro:
- Higher API rate limits. Free users hit the same rate limits as Pro users. We're not going to throttle free users to make paid tiers feel faster.
- More decks / collections / lists. Already unlimited on free. Nothing to bump.
- Better export formats. All export formats (TXT, CSV, Cockatrice .cod XML) are free.
- Public deck sharing. Free.
- Trending / market movers. Free.
- EDHREC insights tab. Free.
Pro buys you ad-free + a metered AI quota + advanced analytics + earlier access to new features. That's it. We're not going to artificially gate features that have no real cost differential just to make Pro look more valuable.
What we'll change as the product grows
A few things will probably evolve:
- The credit cost per AI request is currently 1 — uniform across deck generation, chat, etc. Eventually we'll weight by actual API cost (deck generation is more expensive than a chat message).
- The Pro monthly grant amount is set conservatively at launch. We'll tune it based on actual usage patterns once we have data.
- Stripe checkout isn't live yet. Pro is currently "shown but not chargeable." When checkout ships, all four plans will be purchasable; nothing about the structure changes.
We'll post when each of those moves.
What we won't change
The structural promises will hold:
- Free tier stays a real product, not a demo.
- Ad removal stays a one-time purchase.
- AI stays opt-in, paid-only, off by default.
- We'll never bundle Pro with things that aren't actually Pro features.
If we break any of those promises, this blog post is the receipt.
Closing
Pricing is the most underrated UX surface in software. People decide whether to trust a product based partly on whether the pricing page makes them feel respected or scammed. We tried to write the pricing page we'd want to read.
Four plans. Each does one thing. Free is real. Buy the one you want. Don't buy the ones you don't.
That's the whole pitch.