Free to start. Pro for every semester after.

The free tier has three ceilings, not two: how many AI actions the account ever gets, one; how many courses you can add by hand, one; 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 — a card or an App Store charge only enters the picture if you decide to buy Pro.

The AI limit is one action for the lifetime of the account, and nothing resets it. The app and Semora's server count it the same way, so what the scan tab shows is what the server will actually accept. It is spent when an extraction runs, which means an extraction you start and then abandon still consumes it. The app is upfront about this: when you are about to use it, it tells you before it runs, not after.

The course limit counts only the courses you add yourself: one per semester, so it is the second hand-added course that gets blocked — the first is created normally. Classes synced from Canvas, Blackboard or Moodle are exempt and uncapped, so a full four- or five-course load fits inside free when it arrives that way. You hit the wall when you type a second class in by hand — a seminar Canvas does not carry, a lab tracked separately, or a course at a school whose Canvas you have not connected. 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 app and Semora's server both check it, 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.

• One AI action for the lifetime of the account — a scan, a lecture recording or a document turned into notes — with nothing that resets it
• The scan tab shows whether the action is still unspent, and warns you before you spend it
• One hand-added course per semester — the second is what gets blocked, while Canvas-synced classes are exempt and unlimited
• 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, Android, 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 AI-action counter at all) and opens four groups of features. The first is your calendar: 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 one-action limit 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. 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.

• Unlimited courses and unlimited semesters, plus the one-action limit removed — the same scanner, minus the count
• A 20-scan-per-day fair-use ceiling applies to every account, Pro included
• One-day and three-day advance reminders, plus quiet hours
• 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 & Forecasting, Academic Risk alerts, Progress Insights, Share & Streaks

You probably need Pro if you need to type more than one course in by hand, because the second hand-added course is where free stops. That is common when your school does not use Canvas, Blackboard or Moodle, when a seminar or lab is never published there, and for anyone tracking a recitation as its own course. If your classes do come from one of those, it is a wall you may never meet.

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 you want the AI to do more than one job. Free includes one AI action for the life of the account: one syllabus scan, one lecture recording, or one document turned into notes. Every AI action after that one, whether another scan or another lecture, needs Pro, and so do AI flashcards and the AI Tutor. Importing from Canvas, Blackboard or Moodle is not on that list: it is free on every plan and never uses your AI action.

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 your classes are on Canvas, connect it — every one of them arrives free and stays current — then spend your free AI action on the syllabus you least want to retype, and check the app when you want to know what is due. You will never touch another 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.

What free does not do is carry the AI through a whole term. The action is one, nothing refills it, and a professor reissuing a syllabus in week seven is a Pro job rather than a free one. The honest edge of that argument is that free is a complete semester of tracking with a single run of the extraction inside it, and it is one semester. We would rather you upgrade in week two 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 you never see the scanner touch your own documents before you pay. That is not this one. Every free account gets one real AI action, on purpose, on your own syllabus rather than a demo file, 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 sold two ways. You can buy it on the web at app.semoraai.com, where Stripe takes the card, or inside the iOS app through the App Store, on iPhone or iPad. There are two products on either route, a monthly subscription at $4.99 and an annual one at $29.99. Semora never sees your card details, because the transaction happens entirely inside Stripe's hosted checkout or inside Apple's payment sheet.

What happens next is the part that matters for cross-device use, and it lands in the same place on both routes. Semora's server confirms the purchase with Apple or with Stripe, then records Pro on your Semora account, not on your Apple ID or your card. Every Pro feature, in the app and on the server, checks that one record. That is why Pro is account-wide: signing in anywhere with the same email reads the same answer.

One consequence worth knowing before you buy, on either route: 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 an App Store receipt with Apple and brings the entitlement with you.

The browser has a checkout of its own. Open the paywall in the web app, pick monthly or annual, and Stripe takes the card on a hosted page; when it clears you land back in Semora with Pro already on. Two things are worth knowing before you start: there is no free trial, so the first period is charged straight away, and cancelling later happens under Settings, in Manage Semora Plan, which opens Stripe's billing portal.

The web can also simply read and refresh. The paywall offers a control that re-reads your entitlement from the server, which is what you use if you subscribed on your phone instead 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 phone app, on iPhone or Android, 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 $4.99. Annual is $29.99, which works out to about $2.50 a month, roughly 50 percent less than paying month to month. Twelve months of monthly billing is $59.88, so the annual plan saves $29.89 over a full year.

The break-even sits just past six months. $29.99 divided by $4.99 is about 6.01, so six monthly payments cost almost exactly what a year costs. Set that against a semester: a fall term running late August through mid-December is about five months, or $24.95 in monthly billing. The annual plan is $5.04 more than that and carries you through spring as well. Given that a second semester is itself one of the things Pro unlocks, the year 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 $4.99 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 the US prices; on the App Store Apple charges the local equivalent in other storefronts, and the app displays whatever your store reports.

Where you cancel depends on how you paid. A card subscription is cancelled from inside Semora: open Settings and tap Manage Semora Plan, which opens Stripe's billing portal, and cancel there. An App Store subscription runs through Apple instead — open Settings on your iPhone, tap your name, then Subscriptions, and cancel there, or use the app's shortcut at Settings, then Manage Subscription, which opens the same Apple page directly. Apple's 24-hour rule applies to that route: cancel at least 24 hours before the period ends or the next term bills. Either way 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. 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: what happens to Pro depends on how you paid. Deleting your account in Semora cancels a card subscription automatically. It does not cancel an App Store subscription, because that billing sits with Apple, so cancel it first in Apple's Subscriptions settings, then delete the account. If you ask for deletion by email instead, cancel a card subscription first in Settings, then Manage Semora Plan.