# Pricing. MarkLayer

MarkLayer is a **free app**. There is no pricing. Full stop.

- Price: $0/month
- Annual: $0/year
- Forever: $0
- Paid plan: **None exists**
- Trial: N/A (everything is already free)
- Account required: **No** (anonymous. No sign-up, no email, no login)
- Credit card required: **No**
- Personal data collected: **None**
- Limits: None. Unlimited annotations, unlimited share links, unlimited collaborators

## Every feature is included
- Drawing tools (freehand, shapes, arrows, 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
- 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

## Optional support (not a plan)
A voluntary, one-off tip jar exists at https://marklayer.app/support: pay-what-you-want towards the server bill, handled by Polar as merchant of record. It is **not** a paid tier and it unlocks nothing — no features, no perks, no priority, no account, nothing recurring. Every line above is true whether or not anyone ever uses it. Free alternatives listed on the same page (a Chrome Web Store review, a filed bug) help the project about as much.

## Why is it free?
MarkLayer exists to make webpage annotation accessible to everyone. Infrastructure runs on Cloudflare's low-cost edge services; the source code is open source on GitHub. There is no business model layered on top of users, and there is no plan to add one.

An annotation is a small JSON payload and a share link is a row in D1 plus a WebSocket connection that exists only while someone is in the room. There is no per-user storage tier, no video transcoding, no seat provisioning, and no sales motion to fund, so the costs that push comparable tools into per-seat pricing are mostly costs MarkLayer does not have.

## What free does not include
- No SLA, no support desk, no contract
- Shared annotations are deleted 90 days after they were last opened; opening the link resets the clock
- An explicit expiry you set on a share link is honoured sooner
- If you need guarantees, self-host under Apache-2.0 rather than buy a plan (none exists)

## What the rest of the category charges
Published vendor prices, checked August 2026. Full side-by-side comparisons at https://marklayer.app/compare.

- MarkLayer: free, no tiers, no seats, no trial
- Markup.io: No free plan. Pro $79/month (unlimited users, 1 workspace); 14-day trial
- Pastel: Free plan (1 user, 1 canvas); Pro $29–35/month; Team from $99/month + $24 per extra seat
- BugHerd: No free plan. Standard $50/month (5 members); extra seats $8 each
- Marker.io: From $59/month ($39/mo billed annually, 3 users)
- Usersnap: From ~€39/month; trial capped at 20 feedback items
- Volley: Pro $29/month (25 projects); 30-day trial; no permanent free plan
- Superflow: Free: 1 project, 1 seat, 60 AI credits/month. Growth $24/seat/month (annual)
- Feedbucket: Pro $49/month (2 members, 5 projects); Business $89/month; 14-day trial, no free plan
- Figma: Free Starter plan; paid editor seats from $20/mo (annual)

## Self-hosting
MarkLayer is open source. You can fork the repo, deploy on your own Cloudflare account, and run it as your private tool with no vendor dependency.

- GitHub: https://github.com/thevrus/MarkLayer
- License: see repository

## Links
- Website: https://marklayer.app
- Chrome Web Store (free install): https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/marklayer/fnfobegjifomgobgilaemihpcpidjamc
- Privacy Policy: https://marklayer.app/privacy
- Support the project (optional, one-off, buys nothing): https://marklayer.app/support

Last updated: August 2026