MarkLayer is 100% free.

By Vadym Rusin · Last updated: August 2026

There is no pricing. MarkLayer is a free app, full stop. No paid plan, no trial, no per-seat fee, no premium tier, no usage cap, no upsell. This page exists only to confirm that.

What you get for $0

Every feature is included

• Drawing tools: freehand, shapes, arrows, and lines
• Threaded comments pinned to any spot on a page
• Real-time collaboration with live cursors
• Shareable links: recipients don't need the extension or an account
• Works on any website
• Open source and self-hostable

What does not exist

• No "Pro" tier.
• No "Team" or "Enterprise" plan.
• No per-seat pricing.
• No usage cap or annotation limit.
• No trial period; everything is already free.
• No paywall, ever.
• No "verified" or "premium" account.
• No upsell flow inside the extension.

The one thing that does exist is a voluntary tip jar, once, at marklayer.app/support. It unlocks nothing, and every line on this page is true whether or not anybody ever uses it.

What the rest of the category charges

"Free" only means something next to a number. These are the published prices of the visual feedback tools MarkLayer is most often weighed against, as recorded on each comparison page. Several of them are genuinely worth their bill: a two-way Jira sync or a Kanban board is real work that MarkLayer does not do. The point is narrower: if what you need is to draw on a page and send someone the link, that part costs nothing here.

Prices as published by each vendor, checked August 2026. Follow a tool's name for the full side-by-side, or start from the comparison index and the alternatives directory.

Why is it free?

MarkLayer exists to make webpage annotation accessible to everyone. Infrastructure runs on Cloudflare's low-cost edge services, and the code is open source, so you can audit, fork, or self-host. There is no business model on top of users. There is no plan to add one.

The reason that holds is structural rather than generous. An annotation is a small JSON payload; a share link is a row in D1 and a WebSocket connection to a Durable Object that exists only while someone is in the room. There is no per-user storage tier to fund, no video transcoding, no seat provisioning, and no sales motion to pay for. The costs that force other tools into per-seat pricing are mostly not costs MarkLayer has.

Free also has a cost of its own, and it is stated plainly rather than buried: there is no SLA, no support desk, and no contract. Shared annotations are deleted 90 days after they were last opened. If you need guarantees, the answer is to run it yourself under Apache-2.0, not to buy a plan that does not exist.

Small is not nothing, though, and the bill is somebody's. It is mine, and there is an optional one-off way to put something towards it on the support page, itemised down to the line. It is not a plan, it is not recurring, and it buys no tier, no perks and no priority — nothing on this page changes if you use it, which is exactly why it can be offered at all.

What "free" does not mean here

Plenty of tools are free because you are the product. MarkLayer is not one of them, and the distinction is checkable rather than promised. There is no account, so there is no profile to sell. There is no email field, so there is no list to rent. Annotations are stored only when you share them, and theprivacy policy is short enough to read in full. The source is public, so any claim on this page can be verified against the code rather than taken on trust.

Frequently asked questions

What is the catch?

There is none. MarkLayer shows no ads, sells no data, and has no upsell flow. There is no free tier that expires into a paid one, because there is no paid one. The whole product is the free product.

How is MarkLayer paid for?

It runs on Cloudflare's edge platform: Workers, D1, Durable Objects, and R2. An annotation tool of this size sits inside or near the free allowances there, so the running cost is small enough to absorb. It is a side project, not a company with a runway to recover.

Can I pay for it anyway?

If you want to, yes — there is an optional one-off checkout at marklayer.app/support, pay-what-you-want, and it goes towards the server bill. It is not a plan and it buys nothing: no tier, no perks, no priority, no account. A Chrome Web Store review or a filed bug helps about as much and costs nothing.

Will you add a paid tier later?

There is no plan to. And the licence is the real guarantee: MarkLayer is Apache-2.0, so if a paid tier ever appeared, the last free version could be forked and kept running by anyone. You are not depending on a promise.

How long are my shared annotations kept?

A shared annotation is deleted 90 days after it was last opened, and any explicit expiry you set is honoured sooner. Opening the link resets the clock, so a link in active use stays alive. Nothing is kept indefinitely.

Is there an enterprise or self-hosted plan to buy?

No, and there is nothing to buy. Self-hosting is the fork: deploy the repo to your own Cloudflare account and the annotations never leave your infrastructure. There is no licence fee, no seat count, and no support contract on offer.

Do I need a credit card or an account to start?

Neither. Paste a URL at marklayer.app and annotate. The Chrome extension is a free install for pages the web app cannot embed, such as sites behind a login. No registration step exists anywhere in the product.

Is the free version limited compared to a paid one?

There is no comparison to draw. Every drawing tool, comments, real-time cursors, voice chat, share links, the element inspector, and the MCP server for AI coding agents are all in the one version everybody gets.

Machine-readable pricing

For AI agents and automated tools: a structured version of this page is available at /pricing.md.

Where to go next