💵 Plans and limits

teachChat is free to use right now and nobody is being charged. There are still two limits on a free account, and both can surprise you in the middle of a lesson if nobody told you about them. So here they are.

What the free plan includes

• One active class. Create a second and teachChat asks you to delete or archive the first.
• 30 minutes of live session time per day.
• Every safety, privacy, moderation, and audit feature. All of it. See below.

How the 30 minutes is counted

This is the part worth reading twice, because it is not per class.

The clock counts every minute you have a session running, across all of your classes, added together, for the calendar day. Two classes running back to back both spend from the same 30 minutes. The total resets overnight.

It counts session time, not the time you spend in the console. Setting up a class, editing settings, browsing the roster, printing sign-in cards: none of that spends the budget. The clock starts when you press Start session and stops when the session ends.

The warning you will get

Once you are below half the daily budget, teachChat tells you as you start a session:

Heads up: 12 free live minutes left today. This session will close itself when they run out.

That warning is deliberately not shown at the very start of the day, because a warning you see every single time is a warning you stop reading.

What happens when it runs out

The session closes itself, and starting a new one gives you:

Today's free live-class time (30 min) is used up; it resets tonight. Premium and founding teachers have no cap.

Nothing is lost. The class, the roster, the chat log, the points, and the notes are all still there. You simply cannot run a live session again until tomorrow. Exports still work, so you can pull the record of what already happened.

If you are teaching a full period, 30 minutes will not cover it. Use teachChat for the part of the lesson that benefits most: the discussion, the check for understanding, the review game. It was built to be a segment of the period, not the whole thing.

What is never behind a paywall

Freeze, slow mode, review-before-post, timeouts, blocked words, join approval, the reveal audit log, and exports stay free permanently. This is written into the Terms of Service rather than left as a promise on a marketing page.

Paid plans buy more classes and convenience. They never buy a safer room.

Paid plans

There are none yet, and no card is collected anywhere in the product today. When they arrive they are expected to land between $1.99 and $2.99 a month, priced for a teacher's own wallet rather than a district purchase order, and the exact price is shown before you ever enter payment details.

Founding and pilot accounts

If you are running an early pilot, your account can be marked as a founding teacher. Those accounts have no class limit and no daily cap, and a locked rate that will not go up later. If you piloted teachChat and are still hitting the free limits, that flag is probably missing from your account; email and it gets fixed.

Where to see where you stand

Your limits and usage are shown inside the app rather than left for you to track. If a session ends unexpectedly, the daily cap is the first thing to check, and troubleshooting covers the rest.