Is Later Free? The Free Plan, the 14-Day Trial and Their Limits

The short answer: yes, but the pricing page will not tell you

Later Social does have a Free plan. You just will not find it where most people look. The pricing page shows three paid plans, Starter, Growth and Scale, each with a 14-day trial, and no free tier at all ^[1]. The Free plan lives in the help center, which lists four plans: Free, Starter, Growth and Scale. Free is real, but small. It allows 12 posts per profile a month, shows only two weeks of your calendar in either direction, and keeps a Later banner on your Link in Bio page. It suits a creator testing the waters or a tiny brand posting a few times a week, and very little beyond that.

The confusion has a history. A few of Later's older comparison pages still promise a free plan with no time or usage limits, while the newer ones talk only about the trial. We read the plan guides, the plan reference and the billing articles in the help center and built this page from them. The honest summary is simple. You can use Later without paying, within tight limits, and the paid trial is a separate path with a card attached. Mixing up the two is how people end up with a charge they did not expect, so this page keeps them apart.

What the Free plan gives you

The core of the Free plan is scheduling. Each profile gets 12 posts a month, and drafts count toward that number until you delete them ^[2]. A Reel counts as one post (so does each Story board on paid plans), and the count resets on the first of each month at midnight UTC, not on your signup date. Free comes with one Social Set, the bundle that holds one profile per network, so in theory you could run eight profiles and schedule up to 85 posts a month across them (12 on each of seven networks plus one YouTube Short), by our arithmetic. In practice most free users run one or two profiles and hit the per-profile limit long before the total matters.

The network list on Free is wider than many people expect. You can schedule single photos and Reels to Instagram (Stories and carousels need a paid plan), plus TikTok posts, Threads posts and video Pins on Pinterest (business accounts in the US, Canada, UK, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand, desktop only), and the Visual Instagram Planner previews up to 60 upcoming posts as a grid. YouTube is the odd one out: Free allows one Short a month, while paid plans have no cap. The Canva integration works on Free, as do cropping and the photo filters. File sizes are capped on Free at 5 MB per photo and 25 MB per video, and Later's pages disagree on how much storage Free gets. Short Reels fit. Longer, high-quality video often will not.

Link in Bio is the most generous part

Later's Link in Bio page is included on every plan, and Free gets most of it. You get unlimited buttons, all the themes and fonts, a TikTok feed, featured and multi-item banners, email collection, and up to five links per Instagram post. Link in Bio analytics keep three months of data on Free. The trade-offs are branding and tracking. A Later banner stays on your page, UTM tracking is always on with default values you cannot change, and custom UTM values start at Starter. For a creator who mainly wants a tidy landing page behind an Instagram bio, this alone can justify the account.

What Free leaves out, and why it matters

The two-week calendar window is the limit you will feel first. The Free calendar shows only two weeks back and two weeks forward, on the web and in the mobile app, while paid plans see up to a year. That rules out planning a month of content in one sitting, which is the main reason people pick a visual planner. Best Time to Post is not on Free, so you are guessing at timing. First Comment on Instagram needs a paid plan, and so does collecting posts by hashtag.

Analytics are thinner than the plan guide suggests. That guide promises introductory analytics on Free, but the newer plan reference lists no Instagram analytics history on Free at all. Starter gets three months, Growth a year and Scale two years. In practice, the analytics you can count on with a Free account are the three months of Link in Bio data. If you need to show a client or a boss how posts performed, Free will not get you there.

Team features, AI and support

Free gets no AI credits, so the Caption Writer and the Ideas tool are off. Collaboration and approvals are missing, the Social Inbox shows only a preview, and you get one Access Group with one media library. Post Tags and Campaign Tags stop at 20 each. Support is the quiet limit. All accounts can use the 24/7 help center and the chatbot, but Free users can open tickets through the chatbot only during their first 30 days. After that you are left with the articles and the chatbot, which can no longer open a ticket for you. For anyone running a business account, that matters more than any feature on the list.

How the 14-day trial works, and why it deserves a calendar reminder

The trial is not the Free plan. It is a 14-day run of a paid plan, Starter, Growth or Scale, and it starts at a checkout. That checkout asks for card details, a billing interval and, optionally, extra Social Sets and users ^[3]. A couple of Later's marketing pages still advertise a trial without a card, but the trial FAQ is clear that the card comes first. The trial converts to a paid plan automatically unless you cancel before it ends. The terms add that the card is charged on the last day of the trial. Day 14 is a billing day. The rules around it are strict, and they are worth reading once:

• One trial per account. Accounts that already had a trial or a paid plan cannot start another.
• Changing plans does not extend it. Moving from Starter to Growth mid-trial keeps the original end date.
• Add-ons are charged afterward. Extra Social Sets and users added during the trial are free until it ends, then billed with the plan.
• Cancel where you started. A trial begun on the desktop must be cancelled there, and one begun on iOS must be cancelled through Apple.
• Cancelling ends the offer. You keep the plan until the trial's end date, but you lose any future trial.

This is not a theoretical risk. Later's ratings on business-software review sites are good. Where customers do complain, on Trustpilot, the complaints center on charges after the trial and refused refunds, and most of them trace back to the rules above. If you want the trial, pick the plan you would actually keep, add no extras, and set a reminder for day 12. If you only want to look around, the Free plan does that without a card.

Cancelling or downgrading back to Free

Paid plans renew automatically, and they are non-refundable, with exceptions considered case by case that may carry early termination fees ^[4]. A cancellation takes effect at the end of the current billing cycle, and you keep paid features until then. Downgrading to Free counts as a cancellation, not as a plan change. That distinction matters for annual plans. Moving to Free in month three of a yearly plan does not return the other nine months. Downgrades between paid plans also wait for the next cycle, and leaving Scale requires contacting Later's team.

What happens to your content is the part to plan for. When the paid plan ends, scheduled posts beyond the Free limit are not published, and media, location tags and First Comments on multi-item posts can no longer be viewed or edited. Analytics beyond the Free level disappear right away, and you have to remove extra users, Social Sets and Access Groups yourself. Switching to Free keeps your scheduled posts, media and data, while deleting the account removes them for good. If a payment fails, Later retries the charge several times over a month, then reverts the account to Free with your data intact for reactivation.

Two smaller rules catch people. Plans bought through the iOS app are billed and refunded by Apple, and iOS subscribers must downgrade to Free before they can delete the account. Free accounts cannot update a payment method; a card is added only when buying a plan. Neither is a trap. Both are worth knowing before you click, especially if you started on a phone and later moved to the desktop.

The creator side is free, and it is a different thing

If you are a creator rather than a brand, free means something broader at Later. Creators can sign up for a free Later Social account, and taking part in brand campaigns is free on every plan, including Free. A free account can join the creator marketplace and apply to campaigns, provided the Instagram profile is a business or creator profile with more than 100 followers. Later adds that brand campaigns typically go to creators with 5,000+ engaged followers, so a small account should not count on campaign income. Brands set the payment terms, which may be cash through Stripe, gifted products or other incentives. Some campaigns are invite-only. Creating and sharing a media kit both require a paid plan.

Affiliate income runs through Later for Creator, the platform formerly called Mavely. Joining takes a signup and account verification, with no fee and no application. On the Free plan you can pick existing affiliate links and add them to your Link in Bio page, while generating new links from product URLs needs Starter or above. Put together, a creator can run a Link in Bio page, apply to campaigns and earn affiliate commissions without paying Later anything. Our guide to Later for creators covers that side in detail. Later Influence, the brand-side influencer platform, is a separate, quote-only product and has no free tier.

When Starter is worth paying for

Starter is the cheapest paid plan at $25 a month billed monthly, or $18.75 a month billed yearly, which comes to $225 a year. Paying monthly for a full year would come to $300, so the yearly option saves $75, by our arithmetic. Starter keeps one Social Set and one user, but it raises the limit to 30 posts per profile a month, opens the full calendar, and adds Best Time to Post for Instagram, Facebook and TikTok. It also brings five AI credits a month, three months of analytics, standard support and a Link in Bio page without Later branding.

The upgrade makes sense in three cases. You post more than about three times a week on any one profile. You need numbers to show someone. Or you want to plan more than two weeks ahead. If none of those apply, Free is enough. Starter has firm ceilings of its own: no add-ons, no second user, no approvals and no inbox, all of which start at Growth. Later also has no public API and no Zapier connection on any plan, so paying more will not connect it to your other tools. Our Later pricing breakdown walks through Growth and Scale.

How Later's Free plan compares with Buffer's

The closest free rival is Buffer, which offers a Free plan without a card. It covers up to three channels and one user, with 10 scheduled posts per channel at a time that refill as they publish, plus 30 days of Insights and the AI Assistant. The two limits work differently. Later caps posts per profile per month, while Buffer caps the queue at any moment, so a steady poster can publish more on Buffer over a month. Later's Free plan, on the other hand, covers more profiles in a Social Set and includes a Link in Bio page without using up a profile slot, while a Buffer Start Page counts as one of its three free channels.

Buffer's Free plan also includes API access, which Later does not offer on any plan, and it publishes threads to Bluesky and Mastodon, which Later does not support. Later's free edge is visual: the Instagram grid planner, Link in Bio, and the creator campaigns. If your plan is mostly Instagram and TikTok with a shoppable bio link, Later's Free plan fits better. If you post text updates across many networks, read our Buffer review first. Hootsuite, for comparison, has no free plan at all, only a trial.

The bottom line

Later is free in a real but narrow sense. The Free plan in the help center gives you 12 posts per profile a month, a two-week calendar window, a branded Link in Bio page and almost no analytics, with ticket support only in your first 30 days. That is enough for a creator or a very small account to stay organized, and creators get campaigns and affiliate links on top. The paid trial is a different path: it needs a card, converts on its own, and refunds are case by case. Start on Free, and move to Starter only when the post limit or the calendar window starts to hurt.