What exactly is free for seven days?
Everything. There is no reduced trial edition, because there is only one edition.
Create vaults, have conversations, let notes file themselves, merge, search, export to ZIP, PDF and PowerPoint. Whatever the application does, it does during the trial.
No card is required to start, and the notes you write during the trial are yours afterwards regardless of what you decide.
What does the dollar cover?
The application: the note pipeline, the table of contents and its rebuild, the duplicate check, linking and backlinks, search, the exports, and the updates.
There are no tiers. There is no vault limit, no note limit and no feature sitting behind a higher plan, because maintaining several editions of a small application is a cost that would have to come out of the same dollar.
You can cancel whenever you like.
What does the dollar not cover?
The model. SumizAI uses your own API key, so whatever the conversations cost, you pay your provider directly.
This is the deliberate trade that makes the price possible. Bundling the model would mean charging a margin on every token, and the honest version of that is not a dollar a month.
It also means you keep the leverage: your own rate, your own credits, your own choice of provider — including a local Ollama, where the marginal cost is electricity.
What happens to my notes if I stop paying?
They stay readable and exportable. An unpaid account can still open its vaults and download them; what stops is starting new conversations.
Underneath that policy is something stronger than a policy. The notes are .md files in a folder you chose. Even with no application at all — no subscription, no company — they open in any text editor, and the links between them work in any Markdown tool.
That is what a lack of lock-in looks like when it is structural rather than promised.
How does the licence work offline?
The application checks a signed licence token that is valid for seven days, which doubles as the offline grace period.
So a week without a network is an ordinary working situation rather than a lockout. You can work on a plane, at a conference or on a bad connection without the app deciding you are a pirate.
The reason it is a short-lived signed token rather than a local flag is straightforward: a licence checked purely locally is trivially bypassed, and obfuscating it would be theatre. A signature with a short validity is honest about what it is.
Why so cheap? What is the catch?
The catch is the scope. This is a small application that does a specific job, and it is priced like one.
The expensive part of an AI product is inference, and SumizAI does not resell it. What is left is a desktop application and the server that handles accounts and licences, which is genuinely inexpensive to run.
What you do not get for a dollar: team features, collaboration, sync between devices, support contracts. If you need those, you need a different product at a different price.
Is there a free tier after the trial?
Not for having conversations. After seven days you either subscribe or the app becomes read-only for your existing vaults.
Read-only is deliberately generous, though — you can still open, browse, search and export everything you built. Your material is never hostage to a lapsed payment.
If the cost of the model is your concern rather than the dollar, the free tier you want is at the provider: OpenRouter's free models are listed above the paid ones for exactly that reason, and a local Ollama removes the question entirely.
How do I estimate the real total cost?
A dollar, plus your provider bill, and the second number is entirely under your control.
It depends on which model you pick and how much you talk. Two levers are built in: the note pipeline's small structured jobs — titles, summaries, duplicate scoring — run on the cheaper auxiliary model rather than the main one, and the context sent with each question is capped at the table of contents plus five notes inside a 24 000-character budget rather than growing with your vault.
If you already pay a provider for other work, the marginal cost of using SumizAI on top of it is usually smaller than people expect.
Seven days, no card, one dollar after that
Point SumizAI at a folder, connect the AI provider you already pay for, and start a conversation. The first note files itself.