If you've been burned by a "free trial" that required a credit card up front, quietly auto-charged you on day eight, or turned out to be a feature-stripped demo designed to make you upgrade, you're right to read the fine print first. This article is that fine print. It covers exactly what DayClerk's Explorer plan gives you for free, what the first real charge is, what every subsequent campaign costs, and what none of this is — because the list of things Explorer is not matters just as much as the list of things it is.
What the Free Build Actually Includes
Explorer is not a demo. It is not a time-limited trial. It is a permanently-usable free tier that includes one complete campaign build, from start to finish, at no cost and with no credit card required to begin. That campaign is not stripped down or artificially capped to nudge you toward a paid plan — it is the same full build that a paying customer would produce.
Concretely, that one free build includes: the AI-generated campaign brief, the audience simulation that models how different customer segments are likely to respond to your offer, a published-quality landing page, and the full Content Kit — meaning the email copy, social copy, and ad copy tied to that campaign. All of that, once per account, free.
The free build covers the entire pipeline: brief → simulation → landing page → Content Kit (email, social, and ad copy). Nothing in that sequence is gated or withheld.
The one honest limitation to name is scope: it is one campaign, one time, per account. It is not a monthly allowance that resets. It is not a rolling quota. It is a single lifetime perk — use it on the campaign that matters most to you right now, and use it as your real test of whether DayClerk does what it says. After that, the pricing model changes, and the next section explains how.
The First Real Charge: Publishing Your Landing Page
You can build your entire first campaign — run the simulation, review the brief, read through the Content Kit — without paying anything or entering a card. The first moment money enters the picture is when you decide you want that landing page live on the internet. Publishing the landing page costs $29.98.
That charge does not happen at signup. It does not happen mid-build. It happens when you are ready and you choose to make the page live. You initiate it; it is a one-time Stripe purchase. There is no subscription being started. There is no auto-renew attached to it. You pay $29.98, your landing page goes live, and that transaction is complete.
Publishing is the first real charge — and it only happens when you decide you're ready to go live. Not at signup. Not mid-build.
Importantly, that $29.98 publish price includes the Content Kit. The email copy, social copy, and ad copy are not a separate line item — they come with the publish purchase, for the first campaign and for every campaign after it. There is no campaign in DayClerk where Content Kit costs extra or has to be bought separately.
Every Campaign After the First: How the Pricing Changes
The free build is a one-time perk, not a per-campaign feature. Once you have used it, every new campaign you create works differently: the $29.98 charge comes before the campaign is generated, not at publish time. You pay upfront, the campaign is built, and that payment covers the same publish-plus-Content-Kit bundle as the first campaign. The $29.98 price is the same; only the timing changes.
This is a deliberate design decision, not a bait-and-switch. The free first campaign is genuinely free because DayClerk wants you to experience the full product before committing anything. Subsequent campaigns cost money upfront because the free-build allowance is a one-time introduction, not an ongoing benefit. Understanding that distinction is the difference between feeling misled and feeling like the model makes sense.
Every campaign — first or fifth — comes with Content Kit at no extra charge. The $29.98 always covers publish and Content Kit together. There is no exception to this.
The Add-Ons: Two Flat Purchases, Named Plainly
Beyond the base campaign build, there are two optional add-on purchases available on Explorer. Both are flat, one-time charges. Neither is a subscription. Here is what each one actually buys:
- Audience Add-on — $1.99: Adds or refreshes one audience segment on a campaign, up to a maximum of seven segments per campaign total. If you want to model how an additional customer type responds to your offer, or update a segment with new inputs, this is the charge.
- Regeneration Top-Up — $4.99: A credit to redo everything on one asset surface at once, after your included regeneration allowance on that campaign has run out. If you want to take a completely different creative direction on your landing page copy or your email, and you've already used the regenerations that came with the campaign, this covers one full redo.
These add-ons exist for users who want to go deeper on a specific campaign without committing to a monthly plan. They are entirely optional. Most campaigns will not require either of them. But if you do want to expand your audience modeling or iterate aggressively on a creative direction, the cost to do so is explicit and bounded before you initiate it.
What None of This Is
Given the persona of most people reading a pricing article — people who have been surprised by charges they didn't expect — it's worth being direct about the things Explorer is not, rather than leaving you to infer them.
- Not a subscription: There is no recurring charge associated with Explorer. You are never enrolled in a billing cycle.
- Not auto-renewing: None of the purchases described above auto-renew. Each one is a discrete transaction you initiate.
- Not card-on-file billing: You do not enter a payment method to start building. The first time you interact with a payment flow is if and when you choose to publish.
- Not a crippled trial: The free campaign is not a watermarked demo or a feature-limited preview. It is the real product.
- Not time-boxed: Your free build does not expire. If you create an account today and come back in six months to publish, the allowance is still there.
Every charge in the Explorer model is a specific, user-initiated, one-time Stripe purchase. The amounts are stated before you confirm. Nothing happens to your payment method without you choosing it.
One Note on the Old Article
If you've read anything on this site before about Explorer pricing and it described monthly simulation or generation limits that reset, custom audience segments as unavailable, or Content Kit as a feature locked behind a higher plan — that information was wrong. It described a previous model that no longer exists. The current Explorer plan has no monthly resets of any kind, custom segments are available via the $1.99 Audience Add-on, and Content Kit is included in every campaign's publish price with no exceptions. This article reflects how Explorer actually works today.
If You're Doing This Often: Growth Engine
Explorer's à la carte pricing is designed for people who build campaigns occasionally — a launch here, a product update there. Each charge maps directly to something you chose to do, and you never pay for capacity you didn't use. For many users, that is exactly the right model.
If you find yourself building campaigns regularly — multiple times a month, across several products or clients — the per-action costs can start to add up in a way where a bundled plan makes more financial sense. That is what Growth Engine ($29/month) is for: it pools simulations, generations, and segments into a monthly allowance instead of charging per action. It is not something Explorer users are missing out on; it is a different model suited to a different usage pattern. If you get to the point where you're running DayClerk frequently enough that the math favors a monthly plan, Growth Engine is the natural next step.
Growth Engine ($29/mo) is worth looking at if you're building campaigns frequently — not because Explorer lacks features, but because bundled allowances become more economical at higher volume.
Build Your First Campaign Free
You do not need a credit card to start. You will not be enrolled in anything. Your first campaign — brief, simulation, landing page, and full Content Kit — is free, complete, and yours to build at your own pace. The catch, to the extent there is one, is that it is one campaign, one time. After that, every campaign is $29.98, Content Kit included, paid when you're ready. That is the whole model.