💷 Pricing & Tiers

Source of truth: public/js/pricing-data.js. This answers “who can use it?” — deliberately separate from the feature matrix (🧭), which answers “is it built?”. A feature can be shipped and still be Premium-only, and merging the two questions is how a pricing page ends up advertising something a tier does not include.
Prices decided (2026-10-02): €2.99 / €4.99 / €9.99 a month, VAT included — now the same here, on the checkout page, in the Terms of Service, on the feature matrix and in the AI spend caps, and a test holds them together.
Payments are live (Stripe, since 2026-10-08): a paid tier is bought on the billing page. New accounts start on Free; an account on a paid tier without a Stripe subscription holds it by an admin’s assignment or a temporary grant (below).

Checked 2 October 2026, from primary sources only. Euro prices include VAT — ours, and the Spanish App Store's for Chess.com and Chessable, which price Spain separately and below the US. Dollar-only vendors are converted at the ECB rate of the day ($1 = €0.891) and exclude VAT, marked + VAT. ChessMonitor added 4 October: its page fills prices in the browser, so they were read from its own checkout (Paddle) for a Spanish address, VAT included. Maia Chess added the same day: free, a University of Toronto research project. Full workings and sources: COMPETITIVE_ANALYSIS.md §1.

A trial or comp that ends by itself. It never touches a paid subscription — the user is treated as the better of the two, and when the grant ends they are back on their own plan. With Email them ticked, they get the email shown in the preview, offering to subscribe or go back to their plan. Nothing is granted or sent until you press the button under the preview.

Temporary upgrades from streaks, referrals or admin comps: the active ones, and those that ended in the last 60 days with whether the account then subscribed. Use is counted from the grant's start: days with any activity, minutes on the site, the parts of it used, AI requests and games. Using = active on 3+ days and seen this week; tried = seen this week, fewer days; lapsed = nothing for a week. A grant never alters a paid subscription — the effective tier is simply the better of the two.