AI Usage Limits: Free vs PRO Explained
I get this question regularly: "Why am I limited to 3 AI requests per day?"
It's a fair question. And I want to be completely transparent about the answer—both the practical reasons and the philosophy behind it. Because this isn't arbitrary. It's intentional, and it's fair.
The Cost Reality
Let me start with the honest part: AI costs money. Real money.
Every time you use an AI feature on Jottings—whether you're generating a title, adjusting tone, getting suggestions, or running a prompt through our gateway—I'm paying for those compute cycles. Not a tiny amount either. A single API call to Claude or GPT-4 might cost me $0.01 to $0.10 depending on the model and request size.
If I give unlimited AI requests to free users, the math breaks down fast. Let's say I have 1,000 free users using just 10 requests per day on average. That's 10,000 requests daily. At $0.05 per request, that's $500 a day. Or $15,000 a month. Just in AI costs alone—not counting infrastructure, development, hosting, or support.
I'm not a VC-backed startup burning cash hoping to figure out the business model later. I'm bootstrapped. I'm building something sustainable. And that means the cost structure has to work.
So limits aren't punitive. They're protective. Without them, the free tier becomes unsustainable, and I either shut it down or it starts degrading the entire product.
Why 3 Requests Per Day?
Three felt like the right number because it's:
Enough to be useful - You can generate a title, adjust the tone of a jot, and get a suggestion or two. That covers the main workflows most people use AI for.
Not so much that it encourages waste - It's constrained enough that you think before you request. "Do I really need AI for this?" becomes a question. And honestly? Most of the time you don't. Sometimes the best jot is the one you write naturally.
Testable - If you're on the fence about PRO, the 3 daily requests let you actually try the AI features and see if they matter to you. You're not getting the full experience, but you're getting enough to decide.
Fair to the business - The cost is manageable. Three requests per free user per day is sustainable indefinitely, even as the user base grows.
PRO: The Real Deal
This is where the philosophy shifts completely.
When you become a PRO member, you get unlimited AI requests. Not "unlimited up to a point" or "unlimited within reason"—genuinely unlimited.
Why? Because you're paying for the platform. PRO covers the infrastructure, development, support, and yes, the AI costs. You've opted into financially supporting Jottings, and in return, you get the full experience.
This also changes how you use the product. Free users are conservative. They budget their 3 requests. PRO users experiment. They refine. They iterate. They integrate AI deeply into their workflow. That's how you actually discover what's possible.
I've found this is true for most features: when you pay, you use differently. You use more. You integrate it. You build habits. And you get more value back.
The Fair Use Policy
Now, here's where I get a little protective.
Unlimited doesn't mean "exploit me to power your competing service."
I've built in safeguards because I've seen this before. Someone gets a free account, hits the rate limits, upgrades to PRO, and then tries to use Jottings' AI infrastructure to power their own product. They're hitting 10,000 requests a day through a single account to fuel some other business.
So PRO comes with fair use expectations:
- Personal and business use of your own content - Unlimited. Generate titles, adjust tone, brainstorm ideas for your jots. All good.
- Using Jottings' AI to power another service - Not okay. If you're scraping content or building competing AI features, we need to talk.
- Aggressive automation at scale - If your request patterns suggest you're operating a service rather than using a personal microblog, we'll reach out and work something out.
For 99% of people, this doesn't matter. You're writing, creating, building. The limits are invisible to you. But it protects the system for everyone.
What I'm Actually Optimizing For
This is the part I want you to understand most clearly: I'm not optimizing for maximum subscribers. I'm optimizing for a sustainable product that stays alive.
Free users are genuinely valuable. They write. They create. They tell their friends. They test features. They find bugs. Some become PRO members. The 3 AI limit is how I afford to keep those free users on the platform.
PRO users fund the operation. Unlimited AI is how I say "thank you" for that support.
It's a trade. It's fair. And it's honest.
The Alternative Futures
I think about this a lot. What if I did it differently?
What if I charged per request? Then everyone's paranoid. Users get anxious about cost. Nobody experiments. The product becomes harder to use, not easier.
What if I had no limits? Then I go broke. The service shuts down. Everyone loses.
What if I limited PRO users too? Then PRO becomes less valuable. People don't upgrade. I have fewer resources to improve the product.
What if I made AI a separate subscription? Then users have to manage three different subscriptions (Jottings base + PRO + AI addon). That's friction.
The current model—3 free requests, unlimited for PRO—actually hits the sweet spot. It's transparent. It's fair. It's sustainable.
The Honest Truth
I love building. I love this product. And I want it to exist five years from now, ten years from now. That means making decisions that let me keep the lights on while keeping the product as good as possible.
The AI usage limits aren't punishment. They're just how I've built a system that can actually survive.
If you have questions about the limits, or you're curious whether PRO is right for you, I'm always available. Use your 3 daily requests to explore. Upgrade if it clicks. And if it doesn't? The free tier is still genuinely useful—no hard feelings.
The goal is simple: give you the best microblogging platform possible, and make sure I can keep building it forever.
Everything else is just the plumbing.