Simple pricing

The free tier has three ceilings, not two: how many syllabi you can scan in a calendar month, how many courses you can carry in a semester, and how many semesters the account can hold, one. Beyond those three, nothing on free is metered. Tasks have never been limited: you can track two hundred deadlines on a free account and nothing will stop you. Nothing on free asks for a payment method either — Apple only enters the picture if you decide to buy Pro inside the app.

The scan limit is five per calendar month, and it resets on the 1st. The reset is anchored to the start of the UTC month, and the same boundary is computed identically in the app, on the server that runs the extraction, and in the database rule that backs both up, so the number you see on the scan tab is the number the server will actually honor. A scan counts when an extraction runs, which means an extraction you start and then abandon still consumes one. The app is upfront about this: when you are about to use your fifth, it tells you before it runs, not after.

The course limit is four per semester, and it is the fifth course that gets blocked — the fourth is created normally. A standard four-course load fits inside free exactly. You hit the wall when you take five, when you add a lab as its own course, or when a seminar and its recitation are tracked separately. The counter is scoped to the semester you are adding to rather than to the account, which sounds like it means the count starts over each term. On free, it does not work out that way, and that is worth spelling out.

The third ceiling is the one people find late: a free account holds exactly one semester, total. Not one at a time with the last one filed away — there is no archive. The limit is checked in the app when you create a semester and again by a database trigger on insert, so a free account cannot create a second semester at all. The count only "resets" for spring because you deleted fall, and deleting a semester takes its courses with it, and their deadlines, tasks and grade history with them, permanently. If you want last term still readable in April, or you are running a summer term alongside spring, that is Pro's unlimited semesters, not a workaround.

• Five scans per calendar month, reset on the 1st (UTC), not five for the lifetime of the account
• The scan tab shows how many you have left before you use one, and warns you on your last one
• Four courses per semester — the fifth is what gets blocked, so a normal four-course load fits
• One semester per free account, total; a second term requires Pro, and deleting the first erases its courses, deadlines and grades
• Deadlines, tasks, and grade entries are unlimited on free and always have been
• Grade tracking with weighted averages and your semester GPA are on free, not behind the paywall
• Free accounts sign in on iPhone, iPad, and the web app and read the same data, exactly like Pro
• Joining a Course Space a classmate invites you to is free; hosting one is Pro

Pro removes all three ceilings (unlimited courses, unlimited semesters, and no monthly scan counter) and opens four groups of features. The first is import automation: Canvas, Blackboard, and Moodle assignment import, with the current Canvas token connector usable only where the institution permits it, plus device calendar sync and .ics export so your deadlines land in Apple Calendar or Outlook alongside everything else in your life. The second is planning: Smart Plan builds a study schedule around your real deadlines and adjusts when they move, and the Workload dashboard shows crunch weeks and exam-dense stretches before you walk into them.

The third group is studying: AI-generated flashcards drawn from the syllabus you already scanned and any notes you upload, on a spaced-repetition schedule; a Pomodoro-style focus timer; and an AI tutor scoped to one course that answers from that course's syllabus, your tracked deadlines, and your uploaded notes rather than from generic knowledge. The fourth is control: custom reminder timing, a grading scale you can edit to match what your school actually uses, and forecasting that tells you what you need on the work that is left, plus Academic Risk alerts and Progress Insights.

One qualifier on scanning, because "unlimited" is doing narrower work than it sounds like. Pro removes the five-per-month counter entirely — that is the ceiling that actually shapes a semester. What remains is an anti-abuse ceiling of twenty scans in a rolling day, applied to every account including subscribers, enforced by the extraction function itself. Twenty syllabi in one day is not a workload, it is a script, so in practice you will not meet it; we would rather name the number than let "unlimited" quietly mean something else.

The reminder difference is worth stating precisely, because it is the gate people notice first. Free accounts get same-day reminders. Pro adds one-day and three-day advance notice and quiet hours, so a 3 a.m. push gets held until the window ends. The two halves are enforced in different places, and the honest version is this: quiet hours has a server backstop as well as the in-app gate — the database coerces the setting back to off for any account that is not Pro, so a patched or lapsed client cannot keep it. The one-day and three-day reminders are local notifications the iPhone schedules on the device itself, so that gate lives in the app, which is where scheduling happens.

• Unlimited courses and unlimited semesters, plus the monthly scan counter removed — the same scanner, minus the count
• A 20-scan-per-day fair-use ceiling applies to every account, Pro included
• Canvas, Blackboard, and Moodle import, gated server-side as well as in the app
• One-day and three-day advance reminders, plus quiet hours (quiet hours is backstopped in the database)
• Device calendar sync on iPhone and iPad, plus .ics export, which also works in the browser
• Hosting your own Course Space and inviting classmates; joining one stays free
• Smart Plan, Workload dashboard, Flashcards, Focus timer, and the course-scoped AI Tutor
• Grade Scale and Forecasting, Academic Risk alerts, Progress Insights, Share and Streaks

You probably need Pro if you are carrying five or more courses in one semester, because the fifth course is where free stops. That is common for engineering and nursing loads where labs are tracked separately, for double majors, and for anyone whose seminar and recitation are two separate things to keep track of.

You probably need Pro if you intend to still be using Semora next term. Free holds one semester, so the start of spring is a real fork: delete fall (its courses, its deadlines, its grade history, none of it archived) or upgrade and keep both. Anyone making up credits over a summer term that overlaps a full spring needs it sooner than that, because that is two live semesters at the same time, which free cannot hold at all.

You probably need Pro if your assignments live in Canvas. Importing from Canvas, Blackboard, or Moodle is a Pro feature — the sync function refuses the request without an active subscription, before it ever contacts your school, and the app sends you to the paywall rather than letting you connect and fail later. The free workaround is real, though: copy the assignment list out of Canvas and paste it into the scanner as raw text. It is a manual step, not a locked door.

You probably need Pro if same-day reminders are too late for how you work. Someone who needs Thursday's paper to appear on Monday needs the three-day reminder. Someone who wants every deadline mirrored into the calendar app their job or their family already uses needs device calendar sync, which runs on iPhone and iPad, not in a browser tab. And if you are the person in the group chat who keeps everyone else's due dates straight, hosting a Course Space is the feature you are looking for; that one is Pro on the hosting side only.

If you take four courses, scan each syllabus once at the start of the term, and check the app when you want to know what is due, you will never touch a limit for that whole semester. That is not a stripped-down demo of the product — it is the whole scanner, the full extraction, the review screen with per-item editing and low-confidence badges, deadline and task tracking with no cap, grade tracking with weighted averages, your semester GPA, and same-day reminders, on every device you sign in on.

Free also handles the four-scan reality of a normal semester with a scan to spare, and the counter refills on the 1st, so a professor reissuing a syllabus in week seven is absorbed without anything breaking. The honest edge of that argument is the semester ceiling: free is a complete semester of the product, and it is one semester. We would rather you upgrade in week six of your second term because you hit a wall you can name than in week one because a paywall implied you had to.

There is a version of this app where the scanner is the paywall and free is a taste. That is not this one. Scanning is the thing Semora does, and it is on the free tier on purpose, five a month, every month, with the review screen and the editing and the confidence flags intact. If the free tier is enough for your semester, use the free tier for your semester.

Pro is purchased inside the iOS app through the App Store, on iPhone or iPad. There are two products, a monthly subscription at $3.99 and an annual one at $19.99, and Apple handles the payment. Semora never sees your card details, because the transaction happens entirely inside Apple's payment sheet.

What happens next is the part that matters for cross-device use. When the purchase completes, the app sends Apple's signed transaction to a Semora server function, which verifies it with Apple and writes an entitlement row keyed to your Semora account — your user ID, not your Apple ID. Every feature gate in the app and every server-side check reads that one row. That is the mechanical reason Pro is account-wide: there is only one place the answer lives, and signing into the web app with the same email reads the same row.

One consequence worth knowing before you buy: the entitlement is bound to the Semora account that was signed in at purchase. If you later tap Restore while signed into a different Semora account, the app tells you the subscription is already linked to a different Semora account rather than reporting that no subscription exists. Sign into the account that bought it and Pro comes back. If you switch to a new iPhone, Restore Purchases re-validates the receipt with Apple and brings the entitlement with you.

There is no StoreKit in a browser, and App Store rules require digital subscriptions for an iOS app to be sold through Apple's own purchase flow. Rather than half-build a checkout that would have to be disabled anyway, the web build ships a deliberate shim: the purchase functions are no-ops, and the web paywall says plainly that you subscribe in the Semora iPhone app.

What the web can do is read and refresh. The paywall on web offers a control that re-reads your entitlement from the server, which is what you use if you just subscribed on your phone and want the browser tab to catch up immediately. Most of what Pro unlocks then works in the browser the same way it works on the phone, with two exceptions, and they are both worth naming.

The first asymmetry is notifications. Delivery and quiet hours are handled by the iPhone app, because a browser tab is not a reliable place to fire a reminder about tomorrow's problem set. Your reminder preferences sync everywhere; the pushes themselves come from the phone. The second is device calendar sync: it runs on iOS and Android only, and the web build says so outright — toggle it in a browser and it tells you calendar sync is not available there. The browser can still generate and download the .ics file, so you can get your semester into Apple Calendar or Outlook by hand; the continuous write-into-your-device-calendar half happens on the phone. Home-screen widgets are iOS-only for the same reason.

Monthly is $3.99. Annual is $19.99, which works out to about $1.67 a month, roughly 58 percent less than paying month to month. Twelve months of monthly billing is $47.88, so the annual plan saves $27.89 over a full year.

The break-even sits just past five months. $19.99 divided by $3.99 is about 5.01, so five monthly payments cost almost exactly what a year costs. That maps onto a semester more neatly than most subscription math does: a fall term running late August through mid-December is about five months, or $19.95 in monthly billing — within a nickel of the annual price, with spring thrown in. Given that a second semester is itself one of the things Pro unlocks, the annual plan is the one that matches how the ceilings actually bite.

The case for monthly is narrower but real. If you want Pro for one specific stretch — a finals month, a semester where you overloaded on courses — paying $3.99 and cancelling is genuinely cheaper than committing to a year. Both plans renew automatically until you cancel, so pick monthly if you expect to stop and annual if you expect to still be enrolled next term. Prices quoted here are US App Store prices; Apple charges the local equivalent in other storefronts, and the app displays whatever your store reports.

Cancellation runs through Apple, not through Semora. Open Settings on your iPhone, tap your name, then Subscriptions, and cancel there. The app has a shortcut: Settings, then Manage Subscription, which opens the same Apple page directly. Apple's rule applies — cancel at least 24 hours before the period ends or the next term bills. You keep Pro for the rest of the period you already paid for.

When the subscription lapses, nothing is deleted. Your semesters, courses, tasks, grades, uploaded syllabi, and course notes are all still there, and the free tier keeps working around them. The limits are checked when something is created, not continuously, so if you built seven courses while on Pro, all seven stay — you simply cannot add an eighth to that semester. The same holds for semesters: every term you created on Pro remains readable afterwards, you just cannot create another one while you are back on free. Calendar sync pauses rather than tearing anything down: events already written into your device calendar stay put, and the app shows the sync as paused instead of a healthy toggle that quietly is not running.

Reminders step down rather than stop. Same-day reminders keep firing. Quiet hours switches off, in the app and in the database, which coerces the setting back to off for any account that is not Pro. One-day and three-day advance reminders stop being scheduled by the app on your device, so the last few already sitting on the phone may still arrive before the schedule is rebuilt.

One thing that catches people out, so it is stated on the delete screen in the app: deleting your Semora account does not cancel your Pro subscription. Account deletion removes your data from Semora, but the billing relationship is with Apple. Cancel in Apple's Subscriptions settings first, then delete the account, or Apple keeps charging for a subscription attached to data that no longer exists.