The one test
Every badge is assigned by a single question: can a normal person use this app for its core purpose, indefinitely, without ever handing over a payment method? Everything else is detail. We assign the badge on the strictest honest reading — when it's a genuine close call, we put the reasoning in the transparency box rather than fudging the label.
The three Free Verdicts
The core job of the app is usable forever, on a free tier, with no card required to start and no countdown. A paid tier that adds things is fine and expected — but the free version is a real product you can live on, not a sample.
What disqualifies an app from ✅: a payment method required to begin even for the "free" plan; the core function itself behind a paywall or trial; a free tier that expires (any "free for N days" is automatically not this band); or a tier so rate-limited or ad-buried that finishing one normal session is a fight. That last one is a judgment call, and we say so when it's borderline.
There's a real, permanent free tier with no card required, but it's bounded in a way a meaningful number of users will hit — a usage cap, a feature ceiling, a "personal use only" line. You can genuinely use it for free; some people will want to pay, and we say exactly where the ceiling is.
The line between ✅ and 🟡 is whether the free tier covers the core job for a typical user or only a slice of it. A note app that's fully usable but caps you at one synced device is freemium; a calorie app that gives unlimited manual logging but caps daily photo scans is freemium.
The "free" is a teaser. This band covers free trials that end and then charge (especially auto-renewing trials that ask for a card up front), "free to download" apps where everything useful is paywalled, and free tiers so hollow they exist mainly to upsell. The tell is that handing over money is required to keep doing the thing you came for. We're blunt here, because this is the band the listicles hide.
How the bands actually get used
- A single app carries only one badge, picked by the strictest honest reading.
- "Card required: Yes" almost always pushes an app out of ✅, even when the trial is generous — because the failure mode we're protecting against is the surprise charge.
- We re-check badges over time. Free tiers shrink (the MyFitnessPal barcode story is the classic case); a "last reviewed" date sits on every page, and a badge can be downgraded with a changelog note.
How we check
We sign up for each app and try to complete its core job on the free tier — log a full day, sync to a second device, export the thing — and we note where it stops us: the greyed-out button, the "upgrade to export," the trial countdown. We check by hitting the wall ourselves, not by reading the pricing page. Prices are pulled from official pricing pages, dated, and treated as things that drift. Where we cite community sentiment, we paraphrase real public threads and link them, and we're upfront that a loud subreddit is a vocal sample, not a representative one.
What we don't do
No numeric scores, no star ratings, no "9.1 out of 10." The Free Verdict is qualitative on purpose: it's a categorical answer to a yes/no question about money, not a rating of quality. Two apps can both be ✅ Actually Free and feel completely different to use — the badge isn't a verdict on which is better, only on whether "free" is real.