Socria One

The free tier, the subscription, when Socria asks, access codes, and how billing behaves.

The two plans#

Socria has one paid plan: Socria One, $15/month. What it opens is volume and continuity: no daily count on chats or messages, in Core or in Logos, lines of thinking held only by a fair-use ceiling, and a Socria that carries what it learns about how you reason from each conversation into the next — into Logos 2 as well as Core. It also shares as many chats as you like, and whole Projects, where the free plan shares one chat at a time. Core 3.1 needs no account for a first session, kept in your browser.

What it deliberately does not open is anything Socria can do inside a single line of thinking. All four depth modes, Thinking Maps with unbounded branching and every lens, Research, Draft Space and grounding in your own material are on the free tier too, at full strength. That was a change, and the reasoning is in the table below: a free tier that clips every dimension at once does not read as a trial, it reads as a thin product, and nobody subscribes to more of something they have only watched be mediocre.

Inside a line of thinking, two things differ: how many messages a day holds, counted below, and the size of a document. Anything up to 4 MB travels straight to our server and is read there, on either plan. Socria One carries larger documents, up to 30 MB, through private storage instead, and deletes each one the moment it has been read.

You subscribe from the Socria One page or from any boundary inside Logos. Payment runs through Stripe Checkout; cancelling, changing card and reading invoices happen in Stripe’s own billing portal — Socria deliberately has no home-grown cancellation flow to navigate.

What the free tier holds#

Inside one line of thinking, the free tier is not a trial of Socria — it is Socria, counted by the day. In Core — every model but Logos, so Core 3.1 and Core 4 together — it holds 4 new chats and 20 messages a day. In Logos it holds 2 new lines of thinking a calendar month and 10 messages a day, and a message to a node’s own conversation counts; the first thought you bring into Logos from onboarding costs neither. The day is the UTC day.

Starting a chat and sending a message are counted apart, so going back to a chat you have already started never costs a chat — only its messages. Every message you send Socria counts, including as a guest in somebody else’s shared conversation, where it is your message, never one of your chats, and never the host’s. Its exact shape:

Those numbers are read from the entitlement table the product itself enforces, so this page cannot drift from what actually happens. Most rows are identical on both sides, and that is the point rather than an oversight. Where a figure appears on both it is a fair-use ceiling — a guard against a runaway loop, set where serious work will not meet it — rather than an allowance you are meant to ration; Socria One does not lift those, because there is nothing there to lift.

When Socria asks#

A place to think cannot also be a place that interrupts you to sell, so there are rules about when Socria One is allowed to come up at all — and most of them are rules about staying quiet.

A prompt appears because you did something. Never because time passed, never because you are new, never because a session started. There are two kinds, and they are treated very differently:

You reached a boundary

You reached one of the free counts — the day’s messages, the day’s new chats in Core, or the month’s lines of thinking in Logos — and what you tried stopped. The prompt names what stopped and how to carry on. These appear immediately and are not rationed by the rules below — a button that silently does nothing is worse than an explanation — though the same boundary is only explained once per browser session. A fair-use ceiling never opens one of these at all: Socria One shares it, so there would be nothing to offer.

Nobody asked

At most one of these per browser session, ever. It needs you to have come back across at least two different days with a map of real size, and it only appears just after a reply lands — the one moment where mentioning more room continues what you were doing rather than interrupting it.

Closing the second kind starts a cooldown: a week the first time, a fortnight the second, then two months, then six. Saying no is taken as an answer. Closing the first kind costs nothing — it is a “not now” to what you were doing, not a verdict on the subscription — so ordinary use of the free tier never silences an explanation you might want later.

There are no countdowns, no expiring offers and no manufactured scarcity anywhere in this. The price is on the face of every prompt rather than behind a checkout.

What is never gated#

Two capabilities are free at every tier, permanently, because charging for them would make the product dishonest:

• Trace — seeing where a thought on your map came from, in your own quoted words. You can always audit your own reasoning.
• Correction — telling Logos it read you wrong. You can always fix the record.

The Answer Guard’s “Show solution” door belongs on this list too: revealing an answer you are working toward is never a paid action.

Access codes#

Socria One can also be opened with a typed access code — the same mechanism as the Core 3.1 access key. A code is a soft gate, not a secret: it ships in the client bundle, and it exists for handing out (teams, friends, promotions), not for security.

Typed while signed out

Unlocks One in that browser, stored locally.

Typed while signed in

Also redeemed to the account (via /api/logos/redeem), so it follows you across devices. Codes are case-insensitive.

Comp grants

A deployment can grant One to specific accounts with no billing attached — by user id or email. A comp’d person who later subscribes for real gets a normal Stripe relationship; a comp is never allowed to overwrite one.

How billing behaves#

Stripe is the source of truth for paid subscriptions, and its signed webhook events are the only writer of Stripe lifecycle state. Socria itself writes just two other kinds of row: a pre-checkout customer stub (status incomplete, which never entitles anyone) and complimentary grants from redeemed codes. The rules the projection enforces:

• Cancelling keeps access until the paid month runs out. Someone who cancels on the 3rd has paid through the period; access ends at the period’s end, not at the moment of cancelling.
• A failed renewal does not lock you out. The past_due state stays entitled — a card problem is a billing conversation, not a reason to interrupt thinking you are in the middle of.
• Nothing entitles by accident. Abandoned checkouts, expired subscriptions and unknown states all resolve to the free tier.

For operators: the pricing is configured server-side (the client can never name its own price), and webhook requests are signature-verified with replay protection. The exact setup lives in the repository’s .env.example.