Veracly free scan vs. paid report: what is different, and when to upgrade

The free Veracly scan is not a teaser. It runs the same scanner code, against the same rule set, with the same AI translator pass and the same Ed25519 signature anchoring. The differences are scope, cadence, and detail — not honesty.

What the free scan covers

• One URL — the one you submitted. We render it, run axe-core, capture cookies and the network waterfall on first load.
• Five-jurisdiction analysis if your traffic mix triggers them: EAA, GDPR/ePrivacy, ADA, UK Equality Act, AODA.
• A one-page summary report delivered by email within 5 minutes.
• The top three priority issues with plain-English explanation.
• An audit-ledger anchor — the free PDF is signed and verifiable at veracly.app/verify/<scan-id> the same way a paid one is.

What the free scan does not cover

• Only the URL submitted. We do not crawl your sitemap, follow internal links, or scan account-gated pages.
• Only one snapshot in time. There is no re-scan, no score-drop alert, no weekly cadence.
• The summary lists three priorities; the inventory of remaining issues is omitted.
• Copy-paste developer fixes are not in the free report. The summary says what is wrong; the paid report adds how to fix it.
• The free PDF is English-only. Paid reports render in the seven launch locales.
• White-label branding, sub-accounts, and the API are paid-tier features.

Tier comparison

For an SMB on a single-site, single-jurisdiction footprint, Starter (€79 / £69 / $89 per month) covers fifty pages, monthly scanning, one jurisdiction, full reports. Growth (€199) adds three sites, two-fifty pages each, weekly cadence, up to three jurisdictions, plus Slack and email alerts. Pro (€399) covers ten sites at five hundred pages each, weekly plus on-demand, every jurisdiction in scope, and API access. Agency (€599) is the white-label tier with sub-accounts.

All four tiers are billed monthly or annual; annual is roughly seventeen percent off. Annual customers also get the locked-in price for the first year if we raise rack rates later.

The four signals that say “upgrade now”

We have watched the conversion data on the design partners who upgraded. The pattern is consistent — one of four triggers:

1. Your free scan returned a critical finding. A pre-consent pixel, a missing form label, a banner that fails parity. You need the full report’s fix snippets to actually ship the fix.
2. You operate more than one page that matters. A free scan only tests the URL you give it. If your checkout, your account login, or your booking flow lives at different URLs, the snapshot misses them. The smallest site we have seen that meaningfully benefits from a multi-page scan has six pages; most have thirty to fifty.
3. Your site changes more than monthly. A new marketing experiment, a new tracking pixel, a new third-party widget — every change is a chance to introduce a regression. The pre-consent firing issue is overwhelmingly introduced by a marketing team adding a pixel between audits, not by the original implementation.
4. An auditor, regulator, or large customer has asked. A signed, timestamped, multi-jurisdiction PDF that the recipient can verify independently is the format procurement teams expect. The free scan’s one-page summary is not that format.

The signals that say “keep using the free scan”

Yes, we keep this list too. The free scan is the right tool when:

• You run a single-page personal site that does not collect data.
• You are a developer triaging one specific page before a launch.
• You audit other people’s sites as a one-off, not your own continuously.
• You are a hobbyist or student learning what compliance scanners look at.

We do not believe in selling continuous monitoring to people who do not need continuous monitoring. Honest auditor, not magic widget — the same line applies to our pricing as to our reports.

The trial path

If a free scan returned something you want to dig into, the cleanest path is the 14-day trial: full multi-page scan, the complete report set with copy-paste fixes, and one re-scan cycle so you can see what an “after fixes” report looks like. No card on signup; we ask at the end if you want to continue.

See also: Free website compliance scan: what to look for · Reading your first Veracly report