What's included: Free vs Premium
What the free plan gives you, what Premium adds, and the one thing Premium does not change, which is your match score.
The free plan has no time limit and it is not a trial. It runs real scans and gives you real scores, and Premium raises the allowances and adds depth to the feedback rather than unlocking the product.
Start with the thing most people worry about, because the answer is reassuring: being on the free plan never changes your match score.
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Free never costs you points
A scan runs 11 checks on your resume, and only 3 of them reach your match score: your skills and keywords, your job title match, and your degree match. The other 8 are advice on how your resume reads.
4 of those 8 pieces of advice are shown only on Premium, appearing on a free account as a blurred card with a PREMIUM FEATURE button where the result would be. Because all 4 sit in the advisory group and none of them are scored, a free account and a Premium account scanning the same resume against the same job come back with the same number out of 100.
What Premium buys in the report is precision about where an issue is. Free marks the section an issue sits in, and Premium highlights the exact words on the bullet along with what to change them to, which is the difference between knowing you have a problem and knowing how long it will take to fix.
Scan credits
Scan credits pay to run a job scan, and every scan costs 1 whichever type you pick, so a Smart scan and a Classic scan are priced the same.
A new account starts with 1 scan credit, which is what the scan you run during setup uses. Your first weekly top-up arrives a week later on the same weekday you signed up, and unused credits accumulate from there up to 10, so a week you do not job hunt is not a week of credits thrown away.
Full detail is in How many scans do I get?.
AI credits
AI credits pay for the AI writing tools. They are a completely separate allowance from scan credits, so running out of one leaves the other untouched and you can keep scanning after the AI credits are gone.
The reset overwrites your balance rather than adding to it, so 240 unused Premium credits become 250 at the next reset, not 490. There is no benefit to hoarding them, so spend them on the applications in front of you.
Where a tool runs on both plans it costs the same on both: 1 credit for the Bullet Point Generator, 3 for Keyword Boost, and 5 for Full Rewrite. See How AI credits work.
Improve Resume Quality is Premium only, and it costs 5 credits when you have it. Everything else runs on either plan, out of whichever allowance you have.
Resumes and exports
Free keeps 1 base resume, which is your master copy. The job-tailored copies that scanning creates do not count against that limit, so you can scan as many postings as your credits allow without ever running into it. Premium removes the limit entirely, which is what you want if you keep more than one master resume, for example one per role you are targeting.
PDF export is free on every plan, with no cap on how many times you export, and it is the format most employers and application forms expect.
DOCX export is Premium. Choose it when a posting or a recruiter asks for Word, or when you want an editable copy to work on offline. See Downloading as PDF or DOCX.
Live scoring while you edit
On Premium your resume saves by itself and the score updates in real time as you type. On Free you press save when you are ready and the score refreshes then. The scan underneath runs just as fast on both, so this is a difference in autosave, not a difference in how long you wait for a result.
The Job Tracker is on both plans
Trackers, lists, jobs, drag and drop, and the dashboard are all included on the free plan, with no limit on the number of jobs you track.
Which resume checks each plan runs
This works differently on the two scan types, because of where the results can be shown. On a Classic scan the report is the only surface, so every check has to happen there. A Smart scan works from a resume already in sections, so the writing checks live in your resume score instead, where they can point at the exact bullet.
On a Classic scan
The report runs 11 checks in total. Free shows you 7 of them, and Premium adds the remaining 4, all of which look at how your writing reads rather than what it contains.
The 4 Premium checks appear as a single locked card rather than being hidden entirely, so you can see exactly what Premium would tell you before you decide whether it is worth it.
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On a Smart scan
The report covers skills, job title, and degree, and everything about your writing moves into your resume score in the builder, which runs 21 checks across completion and content quality.
Both plans run all 21 checks and arrive at the same score. What differs is how much detail comes back with it:
- Free tells you which check failed and which section the problem is in.
- Premium shows you the exact words on the exact bullet, and what to change them to.
In practice, Free tells you there is a weak verb somewhere in your work history, and Premium tells you it is "Responsible for" in your second bullet at Acme and what to use instead. Both of you have the same problem, but only one of you has to go looking for it.
Either way, your score is the same
None of the Premium checks affects your match score, and neither plan scores your resume differently. Only skills, job title, and degree are scored, and those 3 run identically on both plans.
Premium tells you more about how your resume reads, but it does not grade you harder and it cannot grade you softer.
What it costs
Paying quarterly saves $9.99 over 3 months of monthly billing.
Monthly and Quarterly are the same plan. There is no feature anywhere in the product that one has and the other does not, so the only thing you are choosing between is the price and the billing interval.
You can cancel at any time, and premium access stays on for the remainder of the billing cycle you have already paid for.
Free Premium for students and military members
Sign up with a .edu, .ac, or .mil email address and your account is given premium access automatically, at no cost, with nothing to buy and no code to enter. That includes unlimited scans, and the AI tools run without spending credits.