A free link in bio plan should give you a working page with all your links, your photo, your social icons and a way to contact you, with no limit on the links and no deadline. If a free plan cannot do that, it is a trial with a different name.
This guide is for judging any free plan, ours included. It covers what you should expect for nothing, what is fair to pay for, the warning signs, and the one question most people forget to ask: what happens to my page if I never pay?
Why this is worth ten minutes
Your link in bio goes into places that are hard to change. It is in your Instagram bio, on your WhatsApp profile, in old posts, and sometimes printed on a card or a poster. Moving it later means changing all of those.
So the plan you start on matters. In public reviews of link page services, a common complaint was not that the free plan was small. It was that it got smaller after people had set up their page. Others paid and found the paid features never switched on, or that the renewal price had gone up.
You cannot control what a company does later. You can check, before you start, how it behaves when you do not pay.
What a free plan should include
These are the basics. A page without them does not do its job.
- All your links. Not three, not five. If you sell, teach, perform or run a clinic, you have more than five things worth linking. A limit on the number of links is a limit on the page itself.
- Your photo, name and a short description. People need to know they have reached the right person.
- Social icons. A row of small icons for Instagram, YouTube, WhatsApp and the rest, so your links are not all spent on your own accounts.
- A way to contact you. Your phone number and email, ideally in a form someone can save to their phone in one tap.
- Changes whenever you want. Editing your own links should never cost money.
- Basic visitor numbers. How many people opened the page, and which links they tapped. This is how you know whether the page is working at all.
If you are not sure what to put on the page once you have it, our guide on what to put in your link in bio covers the order and wording.
What is fair to pay for
Some things cost a company real money or are only useful to people whose page is part of their work. Paying for these is reasonable:
- Changing colours freely, or many more design choices.
- Removing the service's own name or logo from your page.
- More than one page, for example one for you and one for your business.
- A long visitor history, a year or more, and detailed breakdowns such as country and device.
- Connecting outside tools such as Google Analytics or Meta Pixel.
- Downloading the email addresses your page collected.
None of these stop a free page from working. That is the test. A paid plan should add things, not hold back the basics.
Red flags in a free plan
Read the plan page slowly, and look for these.
- A cap on links. A free plan that allows only a handful of links will push you to pay the day you add a new product or class.
- Basics marked "for now". If a feature on the free plan is described as a limited-time extra, assume it can move. Ask whether the company has moved free features behind a payment before.
- Branding you can never remove. Most free plans show the service's name somewhere, and that is fair. Check how large it is, where it sits, and whether paying actually removes it.
- Visitor numbers hidden completely. A free plan that shows you nothing about visits is asking you to pay to find out whether the page works.
- No clear answer about lapsing. If the plan page does not say what happens when a paid plan ends, find out before you pay, not after.
- Prices that are not written down. If you cannot find the price and the renewal terms on a public page, you cannot plan for them.
We do not list other companies' plan details in posts like this one, because plans change and a blog post goes stale. Our comparison pages set us beside other link pages and are kept up to date.
The question to ask: what if I never pay?
Picture your page a year from now, with no payment made. Ask three things:
- Is the page still online, at the same address?
- Are all my links still there, or only the first few?
- If I paid for a while and then stopped, do I lose my settings and history, or do they just switch off until I pay again?
The last one matters most. Some services treat a lapsed plan as a reason to remove things. A better rule is that a lapsed plan changes what visitors see, and leaves what you saved alone.
How Cardless Club handles it
Here is our free plan, as it stands today. The pricing page always has the current list.
- As many links as you want. There is no plan limit on links. Every page, on every plan, has the same technical ceiling on how many items it can hold, and it is set in the hundreds.
- Photos, videos, music and text, plus your social icons.
- Your phone number, email and address, ready for a visitor to save.
- A sign-up box to collect emails.
- Five ready-made looks to choose from.
- Visitor counts for the last 30 days: visits, link taps and where people came from. Older visit records on the free plan are deleted.
- Scheduling. You can set a link to appear later or disappear on its own. We once listed this as a paid feature while it was already working for everyone, so we changed the plan page to match, rather than building a wall.
- A note when a link stops working, and changes whenever you like.
What the free plan does not include, said plainly:
- One page only.
- You can pick a look, but not change its colours.
- A small Cardless Club mark stays at the bottom of your page. A paid plan removes it.
Is it free forever?
We do not promise that. Making a page costs nothing while we are in pre-release, and we would rather tell you that than write "free forever". What we do promise is that you will never be moved onto a paid plan without asking. The pricing page explains how pre-release pricing works.
What happens when a paid plan ends
A plan that ends changes what we show, never what we store. Your page stays published at the same address. Your custom colours, your chosen look and any custom styling stay saved and simply stop showing. If you paid for a year of visitor history, that history is kept, and it comes back when you pay again. Extra pages you made on a bigger plan stay online too. You just cannot make new ones beyond the free limit.
If you are coming from another service, moving your links across takes about a minute and does not change your old page.
Questions
Is a free link in bio plan enough?
For most people, yes. If you need one page with your links, photo, social icons and contact details, a good free plan covers it. Pay only when you want something specific, such as your own colours or more pages.
Should a free plan limit how many links I can add?
We do not think so. Your links are the page. A free plan that caps them is mainly a reason to upgrade, not a useful product.
Will my page go offline if I stop paying?
On Cardless Club, no. A page stays published when a paid plan ends, and paid features switch off until the plan returns. Check this with any service before you pay, because not all of them work this way.
Do I lose my visitor numbers if I never pay?
On our free plan you see the last 30 days. Older visit records are deleted, so if you want a longer history, note your numbers down or look at a paid plan.