Free vs. Subscriber: Here's Exactly What You Get

The question I keep getting after someone signs up: okay, but where does it actually start charging me?

Which is the right question to ask. Subscription software has collectively trained us to assume the thing we actually wanted is behind the $18-a-month wall. You create an account, find the feature, and discover it's "Subscriber only" — and not subscriber at the price you expected. This happens enough times that skepticism is the correct default. I'd be skeptical too.

So here is the direct answer. No soft framing. The actual line, why it's there, and what's on each side.

The Part That Needs a Clear Answer

Cross-posting to Mastodon, Bluesky, and LinkedIn is a subscriber feature.

I want to be direct about that because the free tier is genuinely substantial, and I don't want the paywall to feel like a bait-and-switch. The free tier lets you write, publish, build a feed, follow people, and export your data. It's a real writing environment, not a demo. But the external distribution layer — pushing to three platforms simultaneously — is what the $6.99/month actually buys.

That's a straightforward trade. Connecting your accounts and firing posts to Mastodon, Bluesky, and LinkedIn on every publish is the primary reason most people subscribe. At $6.99/month, that's a pretty low bar if cross-platform reach is part of your workflow. And if it isn't yet, the free tier gives you the full InterlinedList writing experience to figure out whether it should be.

Markdown export is free. Your data doesn't depend on a billing relationship to leave.

The Full Grid

Subscriber is $6.99/month or $60/year — the annual plan saves around 30%.

What the Free Tier Actually Is

Not a demo. Not a stripped preview designed to annoy you into upgrading.

You can write posts, publish them to a live InterlinedList feed, follow other writers, build an audience, and export everything as clean Markdown — all without a payment method on file. The free plan has no time limit. Nothing expires.

That's a real publishing environment. If you write and want a home for your work, the free tier covers that loop completely. When you're ready to extend your reach to Mastodon, Bluesky, and LinkedIn, that's what the subscription is there for.

What Subscriber Unlocks

The headline subscriber benefit is cross-posting. Connect your Mastodon, Bluesky, and LinkedIn accounts in Settings and every post you write goes to all three simultaneously. One composer, three networks, no copying and pasting.

Everything else in the subscription is about organizing and managing serious volumes of structured content.

Structured Lists are the feature that earns the subscription for a lot of people. They're custom relational tables — define your own schema with text, number, date, select, boolean, URL, and Markdown field types. Connect lists as a graph. View data as cards, a grid, or an ERD diagram. Sync a list directly from a GitHub repository's open issues. For anyone who tracks things — research, projects, reading lists, decision logs — Lists are where InterlinedList becomes something closer to a thinking system than a posting tool.

Long-form Documents are the counterpart to short posts. Full Markdown editor, folder hierarchy, image uploads, document templates, per-document visibility control. If you're writing pieces that don't fit in a message composer, this is where they live.

Scheduled publishing does exactly what it says. Set a post to go live at a specific time. All cross-post targets and message settings are preserved and fired automatically by a background job. If you're building a publishing cadence, you don't have to be awake for it.

What's Not Available Yet

AI writing assistance is on the roadmap and not available on any tier right now. When it ships, it'll work with your own OpenAI or Anthropic key — your key, your data, no intermediary model. I'll write about it when it actually exists and I've used it enough to have an opinion worth publishing.

When to Upgrade

When the free tier stops covering what you're doing. That's it. The natural trigger is: you've built enough of a writing practice that you want to organize it into something more structured — lists of resources, long-form pieces alongside shorter posts, a schedule you can set and forget.

If you're not there yet, stay on free. The plan doesn't expire and nothing degrades.

— Adron