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, scores it with the same formula, and signs the result with the same Ed25519 key. The AI translator writes the executive summary and the plain-English text on the priorities you can see. 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.
• Analysis against the rule packs your declared market triggers — an EU market brings the EAA and GDPR/ePrivacy, the UK the Equality Act, the US the ADA, Canada the AODA. You pick that market on the form; we do not guess it.
• A summary report delivered by email within about five minutes. It runs to roughly eight to ten pages: cover, executive summary, per-jurisdiction scorecard, the top three priorities, methodology, glossary, and the legal disclaimer with the integrity block.
• The top three priority issues with plain-English explanation.
• An audit-ledger anchor. The free PDF is signed with the same key and verifiable at veracly.app/verify/<scan-id> by the same mechanic as a paid one, on a shorter clock: free anchors are retired 60 days after signing, paid anchors carry no automatic expiry. Every PDF prints its own verify window in the integrity block, and it says 30 days from issue. When a free anchor retires, the stored fingerprint is erased with it, so verification is genuinely over at that point rather than moving to a slower channel. If the report needs to convince somebody, have them verify it inside the window.

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.
• Evidence screenshots are not captured on free scans, so the priority rows carry no visual evidence.
• The PDF and its record are deleted 60 days after generation, and the verify anchor retires on the same window. A paid report is kept for the life of the scan record, and its verify anchor has no expiry at all.
• White-label PDF branding is a paid-tier feature (Agency).

One thing that is not on that list, because we have claimed it in the past and it was wrong: language. A free PDF renders in whichever of the seven supported locales you selected on the form, not English. The only English-pinned element is the upgrade page at the back.

Tier comparison

For an SMB on a single-site, single-jurisdiction footprint, Starter (€79 / £69 / $89 per month) covers one site at fifty pages, monthly scanning only, one visitor country, full reports. Growth (€199) adds three sites at two-fifty pages each, weekly or monthly cadence, up to three visitor countries, plus Slack alongside the email alerts. Pro (€399) covers ten sites at five hundred pages each, daily, weekly, or monthly cadence, and unlimited visitor countries. Agency (€599) is the white-label tier: twenty-five sites at a thousand pages each, same cadence options as Pro. Every paid tier can also trigger a scan on demand from the site detail page, on any cadence.

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 summary is signed and verifiable, but it covers one page of your site, carries no per-jurisdiction detail pages, no remediation appendix, and no issue inventory, and both the file and its verify anchor are gone 60 days after issue. That is not the artifact you want on file with a regulator or a procurement team.

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.

How to evaluate before you pay

There is no trial tier, and we would rather say so than imply one. What there is: the single-page scan, free and account-free, running the same analyzers and the same scoring formula as a paid scan, against whichever rule packs your jurisdiction triggers. It is the paid engine on one page, not a weaker engine on all of them. One real difference: a free scan covers the single primary market you pick on the form, where a paid plan lets you declare up to three (Growth) or all of them (Pro), so a paid scan of the same URL can evaluate more packs than the free one did.

So the honest evaluation path is: scan your most complex page — a checkout, a booking flow, something with a cookie banner and a form — rather than your homepage. If the findings on that one page are the kind of thing you would act on, the multi-page version will find more of them. If they are not, a paid plan will not change that, and you should not buy one.

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