Fennie Free Plan Explained: Exactly What's Free, and Where the Limits Are
Fennie is free, and the free tier does not expire. That is the answer to the question people come here to answer, and it is the opposite of what "free plan" usually means in this category. The free tier is a permanent, standing product, not a 14-day trial in a free costume. Your data is not deleted on day fifteen, and your courses do not lock. The only thing that changes after two weeks is that the Premium trial ends and the plan would convert to a paid subscription if you kept using Premium.
Here is exactly what is free, what Premium adds, and where the real limits live. You can start free with no card.
What the free tier gives you
Every capability below is fully functional, not a watered-down demo.
- The Daily Plan, every day. Add your courses and deadlines, and it builds a study plan sized to a realistic session each day, then regenerates from your performance. No "3 plans per week" meter.
- Unlimited chat on the basic AI models. Ask about your material, work through a concept, get study questions answered. The free tier does not meter chat messages.
- Notes and basic flashcard sets. Turn what you wrote or pasted into notes and into cards, and the deck schedules with the same SM-2 spaced-repetition algorithm the paid tier uses.
- Quiz generation, scored. Generate a practice quiz from your notes, take it, get scored, and your misses feed the next plan. The scorer is the loop, and it runs free.
- Two simultaneous courses.
A concrete day, the kind the free tier actually runs: you add a Wednesday lecture and a Friday quiz to course one, paste the chapter notes into course two, and the Daily Plan is sized to roughly ninety minutes of actual study time, not a six-hour block you will never fill. You generate a quiz from the chapter notes, take it, get scored, and your misses fold into tomorrow's plan. You generate a flashcard deck from the same notes, and it schedules on SM-2. In between you ask the chat why a particular concept keeps coming up wrong, and the basic model answers with the material you pasted in as context. None of this is a watermark, a "try the premium version" banner, or a "three free plans, then pay" meter. It is the product, and it runs every day.
That is the whole shape of the free tier in one paragraph: a daily plan that sizes itself, unlimited chat on the basic models, notes that turn into cards and quizzes, a scorer that feeds the next plan, and two courses. Everything else is the same engine at a higher ceiling.
Three misconceptions that cost students a week of setup
"Free tier means the cards expire after two weeks." They do not. There is no expiry countdown on the free tier, no "your deck will be archived" email on day fifteen. The only thing that expires is the 14-day Premium trial, and that only if you started it. The free tier runs and it runs and it runs as long as you keep your account.
"Free tier means I can only use basic AI and I will feel the gap." The basic model is not a demo model running on stub data. It reads your notes, it answers your questions about your actual material, and it generates flashcards and quizzes from your actual notes. The Premium models are better at synthesis and long-context work, but for a student in a two-course term who is asking "why does this reaction go that way" with the chapter notes pasted in, the basic model is the right tool for that job.
"Free tier means I cannot compare it to the paid tier without paying first." You can. The 14-day Premium trial is free for two weeks, cancels cleanly, and nothing charges if you cancel before day fourteen. You do not need to prepay a semester to find out whether the wall is a meter or a door.
The two real limits
The free tier has exactly two hard walls, and neither of them is a countdown.
One: two simultaneous courses. This is the one that matters in real semesters. If you are carrying two courses and they are your whole load, the free tier is your endgame and there is nothing you are paying to unlock. If you are carrying five or six, the free tier is a one-course tool and the other five are running on your own calendar, your own discipline, and your own memory. The wall is not "you can only add two courses ever." It is "you can only have two active at once." A course you dropped is a slot you got back. The practical shape of it is this: the student in a two-course summer session who carries organic chemistry and statistics into Fennie free is carrying their whole term in the product, and the ceiling is not touching their day. The student in a four-course fall term who carries two of those into Fennie free is running the other two by hand, and the ceiling is the entire reason the upgrade is on the table.
Two: three AI generations per day, shared. This ceiling is not per tool. It is a daily budget that the quiz generator, the flashcard deck generator, and the note tool all draw from together. A day where you generate two decks and one quiz is a day that is over before the first study session. That is not a product failure and it is not a lock. It is a meter, and it resets at midnight, and the same budget is waiting for you tomorrow. The practical shape of it is this: the student in a light week who generates one quiz and one deck from that week's notes has spent two of the three generations and has one left, and the day is effectively over. The student in a heavy reading week who wants to generate three quiz decks from the three reading assignments and two flashcard sets from the same notes is out of budget before the first study session, and that is the day the upgrade stops being a theory and becomes a need.
There is no other wall. No message cap on chat on the basic models. No card-count cap on the flashcards the free tier can generate on a given day (the cap is on generations, not on cards per deck). No "premium features" preview that you can watch your classmates using but cannot touch. The feature surface on the free tier is real, and the two walls are the product, not a teaser.
What Premium adds, concretely
Premium is 49.99 a year, and it is the removal of the two ceilings above.
- Unlimited courses. The fifth course has a slot. The syllabus imports and the plan covers it.
- Unlimited quiz and flashcard generations. The daily meter is gone. A heavy reading week is not over before it starts.
- Unlimited Daily Plan regeneration. The plan regenerates as many times as you need it to, on the better AI models.
- Chat-with-PDF. Upload a lecture PDF or a chapter and ask it questions about your course material. This is the one Premium feature the free tier does not have at all, and it is the feature that shows up in the most "is this worth it" threads.
Everything else on the free tier is the same shape on Premium. The Daily Plan is the same Daily Plan. The flashcard loop is the same SM-2 loop. You are not buying a better version of the free tier, you are buying the removal of the two ceilings it sets.
The 14-day Premium trial, and the cancel question that causes most of the dread
This is where "free plan" pages usually get slippery, and it is the piece a student reading the bill of goods for a study tool cares about most, so here it is straight.
Fennie's first web subscription comes with a 14-day Premium trial. It takes a card on file only so there is something to convert to when the two weeks end. During the trial you run the full Premium tier, unlimited courses, unlimited generations, chat-with-PDF, everything.
Cancel before the trial ends and nothing is charged to the card. That is the entire risk profile. There is no "we emailed you on day 30 and the billing cycle you missed was the one that caught you." Cancel anytime, after the trial, from settings in two clicks. Your courses, notes, decks, and plan data stay. There is no "your data will be purged in 30 days if you do not restore" letter, and the free tier is still there for you with the same two courses it always had.
The "can I cancel" question on every Fennie thread is a question that costs $0 to be right about, and that is the entire de-risking argument for the trial in one line.
For whom the free tier is the endgame, and for whom it is the on-ramp
For the student carrying two courses and retaining the material, the free tier is not the trial, it is the product. The daily plan runs daily, the flashcards schedule on SM-2, the quiz scores and the misses feed the next plan, and the chat is unlimited on the basic models. Nothing on the free tier is waiting to be upgraded into something better.
For the student carrying four, five, or six courses, or hitting the three-generations-per-day ceiling in a reading week, the free tier is the on-ramp. The wall is real and it is a meter, and the two weeks of the Premium trial is the only version of the "is it worth it" question that costs zero to be wrong on.
For the student who is not sure whether a plan-driven study tool is even a fit for how they work, the free tier is the right starting point, and the 14-day trial is the right starting point for the question of whether the two walls matter to them. Either way, the cost of the first decision is nothing, and that is the point of a free tier that is not a countdown.
FAQ
Is Fennie actually free, or a 14-day trial?
Both, in two different senses. The free tier is not a trial. It is a permanent, standing product, no card, no expiry, your data is not deleted on day fifteen. The 14-day Premium trial is a separate thing that applies to the first web subscription, it takes a card, and you can cancel before it ends and nothing is charged. If you are only using the free tier, nothing expires and nothing gets charged and nothing locks.
What is the two-course limit, exactly?
Two simultaneous courses, not two courses ever. A course you dropped is a slot you got back. The wall is not "you can only add two courses in a lifetime," it is "you can only have two active at once."
Do the three AI generations per day reset?
Yes, at midnight, and they reset every day. That is not a lifetime budget and it is not a daily budget that shrinks over time. It is a meter, and it refills.
Does canceling delete my courses and data?
No. Cancel anytime from settings in two clicks. Your courses, notes, decks, and plan stay available. There is no "data will be purged in 30 days unless you restore" letter, and the free tier is still there for you.
Start free today
Free is zero, no card, and it covers the daily plan every day, unlimited chat on the basic models, notes, basic flashcards, and scored quiz generation, with the two real walls of two courses and three generations per day. Premium is 49.99 a year, and it removes both walls. The 14-day Premium trial takes a card and you can cancel before it ends and nothing is charged.
Start free with no card, run it on your real courses for a week, and let your own two-wall experience be the "is it worth it" answer. Start free.