## I have been waiting to write this one

For most of Alfred Scholar's life, you could use it from anywhere and buy it from almost nowhere.

I would open my inbox and find a message from a researcher in a country I have never been to. They had found the product, read the pricing page, tried to pay, and hit a wall: a checkout that only understood Indian payment methods and a price in a currency their bank would not send. Some of them wrote to me twice. One or two asked whether they could send money to a friend in India and have them buy it instead. That is a generous thing to offer, and a miserable thing to have to ask.

I have been telling those people "soon" for longer than I am comfortable with.

Today it is done. Alfred Scholar is available worldwide.

## Why I made you wait

The honest answer is that I built this for Indian researchers first, deliberately, and I did not want to open it elsewhere by half.

A PhD scholar in India does the same work as a PhD scholar anywhere. The same reading, the same citation chaos, the same manuscript revisions at eleven at night. What differs is the stipend. A tool priced for a Western research budget is not something an Indian scholar quietly expenses, it is something they have to justify to themselves. So I priced for that, took Indian payment methods seriously, and tried to build one market properly rather than serve five badly.

Opening up meant doing that work again for everyone else, rather than bolting a currency switcher onto a system that only really understood rupees. I would rather have been late than have taken your money through something I did not trust.

## What is different, and what is not

If you are outside India, you can now buy Pro or Lab directly, in US dollars. Pro is 19 dollars a month or 190 a year. Lab, which covers a supervisor and four researchers, is 99 dollars a month or 990 a year. Annual saves you roughly a sixth either way.

If you are in India, nothing has changed. Pro is still 899 rupees a month. Lab is still 4,499 for five seats.

I want to be direct about this, because you will notice it anyway: those two prices are different on purpose. I did not raise Indian prices to pay for a global launch, and I am not planning to. The Indian price is not a promotional rate I intend to withdraw quietly once enough people are paying me in dollars. It is the price.

Ability to pay is not spread evenly across the world. Pricing that ignores that is not neutral, it just picks a side without saying so.

## About the trial, which now works differently depending on where you are

In India, nothing changes: three days of full Pro for 48 rupees, which continues as Pro unless you cancel. A small real charge is a fair thing for me to ask in a market that already knows who I am.

Everywhere else, you get **seven days of full Pro without entering a card**. Not a stripped-down version, not a demo workspace with the useful parts greyed out. The actual thing.

I went back and forth on this. The easy call was to run the same paid trial everywhere, because the machinery already existed and I would have made money sooner. But asking someone in another country for their card before they have read a single paper in the product is not a small thing to ask, and I have not earned it there yet. If you have never heard of me, that card field is not a filter. It is a door, and it is closed.

## When your week ends, nothing locks

This is the part I care about most, so I want to be very clear about it.

When the seven days are up, nothing is deleted, nothing is charged, and no wall drops in front of you mid-sentence. Your workspace moves to a **free plan** and keeps working. Your library is still there. Your citations are still there. Your reference sync still runs. What changes is volume: a few documents, a modest number of AI questions each month.

We have all met the other kind of trial, the one that ends by holding your own notes hostage until you produce a card. I was not willing to build that. If you finish the week and decide this is not for you, you should be able to walk away with your work intact and no hard feelings from me. If you decide it is for you, the upgrade will be there when you want it, not when a countdown tells you that you must.

That choice costs me money. I made it anyway. Research does not run on a seven day clock, and a tool built for long, slow work should not pretend otherwise.

## If you are a department

Institutions can be set up directly, in any country. I arrange these by hand rather than through a checkout, because the requirements are never the same twice: seat counts, procurement rules, and sometimes where the data is allowed to live. If that is you, write to me and we will work it out properly.

## Two things I have not solved yet

I would rather tell you these than have you discover them.

**Verified academic pricing is not live.** Nineteen dollars is fair against the three or four separate subscriptions Alfred Scholar replaces. It is also real money for a graduate student in a country where the stipend is small and the currency is weak, and I know that because that is exactly who I built the Indian pricing for. I think the right answer is a verified academic rate rather than a lower list price for everybody, and it is the next pricing thing I intend to build.

**Your billing region is set when you create your account**, based on where you are at that moment. If you move countries, or something on your billing page looks wrong, write to me. I will fix it by hand.

## Mostly, thank you

To everyone who wrote asking when they could pay me, and then waited: thank you. You had every reason to go and use something else. A number of you did not, and I noticed.

I built Alfred Scholar in India, for scholars who were being asked to pay Western prices on Indian stipends. It is still that. It is just no longer only that.

If you have been waiting, the door is open now. Take the week, bring a paper you are actually stuck on, and ask it something difficult.