What You Can Do on InterlinedList Before You Pay Anything
Sat May 16
Foundational series, post 3 of 5.
Subscription products have a reputation for burying the useful stuff behind the paywall and calling a stripped-down demo a "free tier."
I want to be specific about what InterlinedList actually gives you for free — not a feature table, but what you can actually do with it.
The Goal of the Free Tier
The free tier is designed around one thing: giving you enough to establish a real writing and collecting practice before asking you to pay.
That means the limits are on organizational depth — how many series you can track, how many research lists you can maintain — not on the core work itself. You can collect, draft, and publish freely. The cap is on the infrastructure you build around that work.
Here's what that looks like in practice.
What's Fully Unlimited
Entries. Create as many interlined entries as you want. No cap. Raw captures, half-baked drafts, finished posts — all of it, unlimited. Collect everything.
Publishing. Every entry you move to Live publishes to your public feed. No limit on how many, how often, or how long.
Entry linking. Link entries to each other without restriction. Structural connections between your entries are a core feature. Not a paid one.
Tag organization. Tags are fully available. Create as many as you want, apply as many as you need. Tag lists — the aggregated view of everything tagged with a given topic — work in full.
Full-text search. Your entire entry corpus is searchable. Stage filters, tag filters, date range filters — all of it.
Feed and profile. Your public feed and profile are live. Anyone can read your published entries without an account.
OAuth login via GitHub, Mastodon, or Bluesky. No new password to manage.
What Has Limits
Series: up to 3 active. Three series at once on the free tier. For a writer with one or two active projects, that's enough to start. When you need more — that's the natural upgrade point.
Research lists: up to 3. Three research lists — groups of source material attached to active drafts. Same idea: enough to start, and the natural limit to hit when your drafting work grows.
Templates: built-in only. Default templates for common content types are included. Custom templates — defining your own repeatable entry structures — require Writer tier.
What Requires a Paid Tier
Markdown export. Exporting entries as .md files for static site generators, note systems, or external pipelines requires Writer or above. On free you can see an export preview — what your entry would look like as Markdown — but you can't download it.
AI assistance. Context-aware draft expansion and tightening requires Writer or above.
Collaborative review. Sharing entries for review before publishing requires Writer or above.
Cross-platform syndication. Publishing to Mastodon, Bluesky, and LinkedIn simultaneously requires Creator tier.
Source/published sync. Dashboard sync state tracking for published entries requires Creator tier.
Data API access. Programmatic access to your entry corpus, lists, and syndication hooks requires Creator tier.
What You Actually Get
On the free tier you can maintain a collecting and writing practice indefinitely.
Save every idea. Develop the ones worth developing. Publish the finished work to a live feed. Build a tag-organized corpus of linked entries. Search across everything you've ever written or collected.
That's a meaningful writing tool. Not a stripped-down preview — an actual tool.
The limits you'll hit are the ones that matter when your practice has outgrown beginner-level infrastructure: more than three active projects running in parallel, wanting to export to your static site, wanting to reach your Mastodon or Bluesky audience directly, or needing AI assistance to maintain publishing pace.
Those are Writer and Creator problems. The free tier covers everything that comes before them.
When to Upgrade
Upgrade to Writer when:
- You've hit the series or research list limit and genuinely need more
- You want to export entries as Markdown for another pipeline
- You want AI assistance for drafting or tightening
- You want to share drafts with collaborators before publishing
Upgrade to Creator when:
- You want to syndicate to Mastodon, Bluesky, or LinkedIn as part of your publishing workflow
- You want to track whether published entries have drifted from their source
- You want programmatic access to your entry data via the API
No time pressure on either. The free tier doesn't expire, and your data doesn't degrade or become inaccessible if you stay on free indefinitely.
Next post walks through the full workflow from raw idea to published post — one session, start to finish, so you can see how all of this fits together.
— Adron