The three plans
Scholar — Free. The essentials, unlimited: documents, sources, every citation style, and Word export. You also get a monthly taste of the AI — 3 Cold Starts/month, 10 Scholar AI questions/month, and 3 Proofreads/month, plus unlimited inline citation suggestions as you write. You also get 3 authorship certificates & proof-of-work reports/month, and a free Folio Surveyor sample (up to 50 responses).
Fellow — $9.99/mo (or $99/year). Unlocks the integrity moat: citation & claim checking, daily Document Audit, Research Radar with email digests, literature discovery & synthesis, unlimited authorship certificates & proof-of-work reports, daily AI (Cold Start, Scholar AI, Proofreading), and collaboration (view & comment).
Chair — $25/mo (or $250/year). Everything in Fellow, with roughly double the AI limits, unlimited proofreading, document version history, unlimited Folio Surveyor (unlimited responses + AI analysis), and direct founder support.
Annual billing saves roughly two months versus paying monthly. You can switch between monthly and annual whenever you like.
What "free" really means
Free is a genuine workspace, not a locked demo — you can write, manage a full library, and cite without limits. Folio's integrity toolkit has three layers, and only one of them is paid:
- Attested writing (a timestamped record of how you wrote) — every plan, no limit.
- Authorship certificates & proof-of-work reports — 3/month free on Scholar, unlimited on Fellow and Chair.
- AI citation & claim checking, and Document Audit — Fellow and Chair only.
What is reserved for paid plans is that AI-powered checking layer, plus discovery, synthesis, Research Radar, and Folio Surveyor's higher response caps and AI analysis. If you hit a monthly AI limit on the free plan, you will see an upgrade prompt explaining exactly what you have used.
Upgrading
When you trigger a paid feature, Folio shows an upgrade prompt that takes you to a secure checkout. Pick Fellow or Chair, pay, and you'll be brought straight back to Folio — your new plan appears on your account within a few seconds of the payment confirming.
Managing your subscription
Go to Account → Manage Billing to update your card, change plan, or cancel. Billing is handled by our payment provider (LemonSqueezy), so the billing portal lives at app.lemonsqueezy.com/my-orders.
If you cancel, you keep your paid features until the end of the period you have already paid for, then revert to the free Scholar plan — your documents and sources are never deleted.
Refunds
We offer a full refund within 7 days of your first paid charge — see our Refund Policy for the details. If a free or discounted period came first (a referral reward, a retention offer, a promo code, or a beta credit), that $0 period doesn't start or count against the 7-day window — it opens on the date you're first actually charged.
Referral rewards: give a month, get a month
Invite a colleague and you can both come out ahead — no support ticket, it just runs.
Your referral link lives under Account → Profile (you'll also see it offered right on your dashboard, and right after you mint an Integrity Certificate). Copy it and send it to a colleague:
- They get their first month of Fellow free as soon as they sign up through your link.
- You get a free month too — once they subscribe to a paid plan, a month is credited to your account. If you're already on a paid plan, it's banked and kicks in automatically when your current paid period ends, so it never gets lost.
Account → Profile also shows a running tally: how many friends have joined, how many have subscribed, and how many free months you've banked.