Forge Is Free. Permanently.

We had a paid plan. It went live on the 22nd of August and it lasted a day. We have taken it out, and this post is the explanation, because "it's free now" without a reason is the kind of thing that makes people wait for the catch.

What free actually covers

All of it. Specifically:

• The full, test-condition Digital SAT diagnostic, Rasch-scored, with a real score projection.
• Your cognitive map across all five dimensions, which is the diagnosis rather than just a number.
• Targeted practice from 5,000+ original and licensed questions, steered at your weak spots.
• Checkpoint tests, spaced review of everything you miss, and your score trajectory tracked after every session.
• The arcade. Every game, no account needed.
• The score-report reader, the study-plan generator, and this blog.
• A portable learning profile you carry into future Vindica products, including AP and TOEFL.
• Your data, deletable in one click, whenever you want.

There is no second tier sitting behind this list. We did not move the good parts into a plan you have not heard about yet.

Nothing is free. Somebody is paying, and if it is not the student then the student is the product. Explain yourselves.

Who pays for it

Fair question, and it has a boring answer. We build a second product called VindicaOS, which is the platform schools and tutoring centres run their programmes on. Those are institutions with budgets, and they pay us. Forge is subsidised out of that.

So the money comes from an academy in Seoul buying software, not from you, and not from selling anything about you to anyone. Your data is yours, you can delete it in one click, and there is no advertising business hiding behind the free tier. That is the whole arrangement. It is not clever and it does not need to be.

I went looking for the angle. There is a version of the product they hold back, or a card they need eventually, or a limit they do not mention until week three. Could not find one. Slightly annoyed about it.

The honest reason

Here is the part that is more uncomfortable to write.

The thing Forge would have been charging for is the claim that we can see how you work, not just what you got wrong. That is the interesting bit, it is what the cognitive map is built on, and it is the reason we exist rather than being one more question bank.

We cannot yet show that it does what we say. Not because we tested it and it failed, but because we do not have enough students to run the test properly. Establishing whether a signal like that is real needs several hundred learners working through enough material to see the pattern. We are a long way short of that, and every honest attempt we have made so far has come back inconclusive rather than positive.

Charging money for a claim we cannot support would be bad. Putting a paywall in front of the practice that would let us find out whether the claim is true is worse. Those two facts pointed the same direction, so we followed them.

You may not charge for a claim you have not yet proved. Sell the thing that works today, and give away the thing you are still testing.

There is a second, less noble reason, and we would rather say it than have you guess it. At our size, a paid plan was never going to raise a meaningful amount of money. It would have bought us a rounding error and cost us the students. That is a bad trade at any price, and it becomes an obvious one once you write it down.

Why you can believe "permanently"

Every product that has ever charged you money once told you it was free, so the word is worth roughly nothing on its own. Two things back it here.

Free is the default in the code, not a setting. The old arrangement had a date, and if nobody touched anything, the paywall would eventually switch itself on. We inverted that. Now the absence of configuration means free, a broken or missing setting fails towards free, and turning charging back on would require somebody to deliberately go and arm it. There are tests that assert this and would fail if it drifted. That is a structural commitment rather than a promise in a blog post, which is the only kind worth anything.

The revenue lives somewhere else. Forge is not the business. If we need to make more money, we sell more VindicaOS, and none of that pressure has to arrive at a student's screen. A free tier is only in danger when it is the only thing in the building.

What we would like instead

Use it, and tell us when it is wrong.

That is not a softer version of asking for money, it is the actual thing we need. The reason we cannot yet prove the claim is that not enough people have worked through enough material. Every diagnostic taken and every practice set finished makes the answer to that question sharper, and if it turns out the signal is not there, we would rather find out than keep selling it.

So if something is broken, confusing, or plainly wrong, tell us. People writing in about a menu they could not find is why the full practice test is easier to reach this week than it was last week. That loop works, and it is worth more to us than a subscription.

So I just... use it. All of it. And the thing I should do in return is complain when it breaks. I can do that.

If you have never used Forge, the place to start is the diagnostic, which takes a real sitting and hands back the map rather than a number. If you sat the SAT this weekend and are waiting on a score, this one is more useful to you today. And if you are wondering whether any of this is worth doing instead of a paid course, we wrote an honest comparison that does not always come out in our favour.

No tiers, no trial, no card. Go and use the thing, and tell me what breaks.