The Free Tier Is the Real Product

You've met the other kind of "free."

You sign up, you start building, the idea is flowing — and then you reach for the good reverb, or the chorus, or the export button, and there's a little lock icon. The free version was never meant for you to finish in. It was a trailer for the paid one.

We didn't want to build that. So we didn't.

#Where the line actually is

In Onomo, every tool that makes the music is free. Not a sampler of them. All of them.

• All 20 synth engines and all 7 drum engines — each one its own kind of synthesis, built from scratch with real DSP.
• Every effect, on every track, bus and master.
• All four surfaces: the DAW, the design editor, the video editor, and the writing room.
• The thousands of factory sounds — every one of them made on these engines.

No instrument, effect, or surface is ever behind a paywall. The free tier isn't a crippled demo of the product. It is the product.

So what do you pay for? The two things that actually cost us money to run: storage in the cloud, and AI credits — the generation that hits real models on real GPUs. Those have a marginal cost we can't wave away. The creative engine doesn't. Once it's built, your thousandth beat costs us the same as your first: nothing. So we don't charge for it.

#Why we feel strongly about this

The talent in this generation isn't the bottleneck. Access is.

There's a kid right now with a laptop, a cracked idea for a hook, and no money, who is exactly as capable as someone with a rack of plugins — they just can't afford to find out. The tools to make music have quietly become a luxury good. A real production setup can cost more in monthly subscriptions than a bedroom artist makes from their music in a year. That math keeps people out who should be in.

We think that's the actual problem worth solving — not making a slightly nicer compressor, but making the whole thing reachable. If you can open a browser, you can open a studio. That's the bar we wanted to clear.

It's also, frankly, the kind of company we want to be. The free tier being real is a promise about who Onomo is for. It's for the person who couldn't otherwise be here.

#The honest part

A model like this only works if the paid reasons are real, not invented. We're not going to fake scarcity to push you to upgrade — no "you've used your 3 free songs," no watermark on your export, no nagging the second you do something good.

You'll upgrade when you genuinely need more room to keep your work, or more AI to lean on. That's it. If you never need either, you can make and release entire songs on the free tier, forever, and we're glad you're here.

We're early, and we'll keep saying that out loud. But this part isn't going to drift: the tools to make music shouldn't cost a month's pay, and in Onomo they don't.

Start free. Stay free if that's all you need. Make something either way.