The Free Plan

The Free plan is TimberCloud's permanent, no-cost way to put your catalog online and start collecting customer inquiries — no credit card, no time limit. It runs a branded, inquiry-only storefront: shoppers browse your products and request quotes instead of paying online. When you're ready to set prices, take payments, and unlock the rest of the platform, you upgrade to Commerce (or higher) in a single click — with no data loss.

Note: Free is a plan, not a trial. It never expires and never asks for a card. It's different from the 14-day free trial that comes with paid plans — see Billing & Free Trial for that.

What Free is

• Price: $0/month, forever.
• No credit card required to sign up or to keep using it.
• A branded, white-label storefront at embed.timbercloud.com/<your-slug> that you can also embed on an existing website.
• Inquiry/quote-only: prices are hidden and payments are off, so customers send you inquiries (quote requests) instead of checking out.
• 1 user (the owner/admin).

Free is designed as a no-risk on-ramp: get your products listed, share your storefront, and gather real customer interest. Everything you build on Free carries straight over when you upgrade.

What's included

On the Free plan you can:

• Build and edit your catalog — create products, attributes, options, and categories.
• Publish up to 5 products to your storefront.
• Manage customers — add and edit customer records and contacts.
• Receive inquiries in a real inbox — every quote request from your storefront lands in your dashboard.
• Edit your settings — company profile, contact info, storefront basics, and locale.
• Embed your storefront on your existing site, or share the hosted embed.timbercloud.com/<your-slug> link directly. See Embeddable Storefront.

Free plan limits

Tip: The product cap counts only published products. You can keep building unpublished/draft products in your catalog and publish them after you upgrade.

What's not included (gated until you upgrade)

The Free plan deliberately leaves the revenue-generating features for paid tiers. On Free you cannot:

• Set prices — the entire pricing UI (base prices, option prices, line-item prices, and the Formula Builder) is locked.
• Accept payments — you can't connect Stripe or take card payments. The storefront is quote-only.
• Use AI features — the AI Order Assistant, AI Pricing Assistant, AI Product Builder, and Site Builder AI are all off on Free.
• Build a hosted website — the multi-page Site Builder website (Customer Site CMS) requires Commerce or higher.
• Connect a custom domain — Free shops live at embed.timbercloud.com/<your-slug>; bring-your-own-domain starts at Commerce.
• Invite a team — Free includes a single seat; the Users/team page and additional seats require a paid plan.

One thing you'll notice in the dashboard: on Free, the "Orders" navigation item is labeled "Inquiries", since every storefront submission is a quote request rather than a paid order.

How customers submit inquiries on a Free storefront

Because Free is structurally inquiry-only, the storefront automatically runs in Quote-Based selling mode with prices hidden:

1. A shopper browses your published products and configures the options they want.
2. Instead of an "Add to Cart / Pay" button, they see a Request Quote action — no prices are shown anywhere.
3. They submit their details and configuration, which creates an inquiry in your inbox.
4. You review the inquiry in the dashboard (under Inquiries), follow up with the customer, and quote them directly.

You don't have to configure this — Free forces the inquiry-only behavior for you, and you can't accidentally expose prices or enable checkout while on Free.

Note: Free allows up to 50 inquiries per calendar month. The count resets automatically at the start of each month — there's no counter to clear and nothing to do. Upgrading to a paid plan removes the cap immediately.

Upgrading from Free to Commerce

When you're ready to sell, upgrade to Commerce ($199/mo, or $1,990/yr) from Settings → Company → Manage Subscription, or from any in-app upgrade prompt. Upgrades are pro-rated and take effect immediately.

Upgrading to Commerce unlocks:

• Pricing — set base, option, and line-item prices, and build formula-based pricing with the Formula Builder and the AI Pricing Assistant.
• Payments — connect your own Stripe account (Stripe Connect) and take card payments through Direct Order checkout. Payouts go straight to your Stripe account; TimberCloud never holds your funds.
• AI features — the AI Order Assistant, AI Product Builder, and Site Builder AI.
• A hosted Site Builder website and the ability to connect a custom domain with automatic SSL.
• Unlimited published products and orders, customer reviews, email & SMS notifications, and basic shipping options.

Higher tiers — Build, Production, and Enterprise — add shipping & carrier services, reports, purchasing, team seats, production management, and more. See Subscriptions & Plans for the full comparison, and Billing & Free Trial for how billing and the 14-day trial work.

Tip: Paid monthly plans (Commerce and Build) start with a 14-day full-feature free trial — you can evaluate the whole platform before any charge. A credit card is required to start the trial. Details on Billing & Free Trial.

Downgrading a paid shop to Free

You can move a paid shop back down to Free anytime through Settings → Company → Manage Subscription (the Stripe Customer Portal). The downgrade is non-destructive and fully reversible:

• Your data and prices are preserved — pricing, formulas, order totals, and line-item prices stay in the database. They're simply hidden, not deleted.
• The storefront becomes inquiry-only immediately — prices are hidden and checkout/payments turn off the moment the downgrade takes effect.
• Products over the 5-product cap stay accessible — nothing is auto-archived. The cap only blocks new publishes (and un-archiving more products); products you already published beyond the cap remain in place until you archive them or upgrade again.
• Existing orders are untouched — no order totals or history are rewritten.

Re-upgrading restores everything

When you upgrade back to a paid plan, your pricing UI and data come back instantly — no migration, no data loss. A few practical notes:

• All your preserved prices and formulas are editable again right away.
• The 50-inquiries/month cap stops applying immediately.
• For safety, "show prices" on the storefront isn't auto-flipped back on — once you're back on a paid plan, re-enable price visibility from your storefront settings when you're ready to display prices and accept orders again.

Starting on Free

There are two ways to land on the Free plan:

• New signup — choose Free during sign-up. No credit card is collected, and your shop is created as a permanent Free, inquiry-only storefront.
• Existing account — if you're already on a paid plan (or a trial), switch down to Free from Settings → Company → Manage Subscription. Your catalog, customers, and data carry over and are preserved as described above.

Related pages

• Subscriptions & Plans — the full five-tier comparison and feature gating.
• Billing & Free Trial — the 14-day trial, annual vs. monthly, platform fees, and managing your subscription.
• Storefront settings — selling mode and price visibility.
• Your Website — the hosted Site Builder website (Commerce and up).