Onboarding and billing
New accounts go through a three-step onboarding — welcome, organization, plan — that ends by picking a tier and starting a 14-day trial or paying now on your first organization.
The first time you sign in, Inklate walks you through a short three-step onboarding that ends by choosing how you pay. There is no free tier at signup: your first organization must either start a 14-day free trial or pay today before you reach the dashboard. This page covers the signup flow; for ongoing plan management, tier details, and invoices, see Billing, plans, and AI credits.
The three steps
Onboarding runs once per account, right after your first passwordless sign-in.
- Welcome — confirm your name (it personalizes your account and the billing customer created later) and optionally tell Inklate what you do and how you found it. Those two are product signals, not required fields.
- Organization — name your organization and pick its URL handle. The page previews
app.inklate.com/<slug>as you type and checks the handle’s availability live, so a taken URL shows up on the field before you submit. This organization is your workspace: channels, posts, teammates, and billing all live inside it. Use one per brand or client. - Plan — the gate. Pick a tier, then start the 14-day free trial or skip it and pay now.
You resume where you left off: if you close the tab after creating the organization, returning drops you back on the plan step rather than starting over.
The plan gate: trial or pay now
The plan step is the only thing standing between a new account and the dashboard. It offers two ways in:
- Start the 14-day free trial. A card is required, but nothing is charged today. The first charge lands when the trial ends on day 14, and you can cancel any time before then and pay nothing. Trials start with a small grant of AI credits so you can try skills right away.
- Skip the trial and pay now. You are charged immediately for the tier and billing cadence you picked.
This gate applies only to your first organization. A new user can’t reach the app without subscribing, so their one organization is always covered. Additional organizations you create later run under a free tier instead — see below.
Checkout is handled by DodoPayments, the merchant of record; Inklate never sees or stores your card details. Only organization owners and admins can act on billing, so a regular member of a lapsed organization is never dead-ended at a paywall — they keep working and meet in-context limits instead.
Choosing a tier on the plan step
The plan step shows the two plans — Pro and Team (prices) — with Pro preselected and annual billing (two months free) as the default cadence. Each card leads with its monthly Ink grant, and Team offers a seat stepper for adding teammates.
The picker quotes the exact figure the trial will bill or the pay-now button will charge, matched to the tier, seats, and cadence you chose. The full breakdown — seats, channels, brands, and the credit wallet — lives in Billing, plans, and AI credits.
Additional organizations run free
Once you have passed the first-org gate, any additional organization you create runs free until it needs a paid feature:
- Post quota — a free organization can hold up to 5 posts. Creating a sixth requires upgrading that organization.
- Inviting teammates — a paid feature. Free organizations work solo.
- AI credits and channels — free organizations have no credit wallet, and cap at 6 connected channels.
When you hit one of these limits, the error names which one, and the upgrade dialog opens with that reason attached. You can also upgrade any time from the plan picker in that organization’s billing settings — or, if your subscription’s tier covers more than one brand, attach the organization to it instead.