Why Dolly's free plan is this generous

Updated 15 October 2026: Dolly now has a Free plan, Pro (€9.99 a month or €59 a year) and a one-time Lifetime license. This post explains why it is set up that way.

When people see Dolly's free plan, the first question is usually not "is it good?" but "what's the catch?" Unlimited recording with no time limit, the full editor, auto zoom, a smooth redrawn cursor, nice backgrounds and export up to 1080p, for €0. The tools it competes with either stop you at five minutes or ask for a subscription before you can export. So this is the honest answer: why Free is what it is, what you pay for when you pay, and what we promise if things change.

The price follows the architecture

Most software prices are set by what the market will bear. Dolly's started from a different question: what does it actually cost us when one more person uses it?

For a cloud product, the answer is "quite a lot, every month." Every video you record is uploaded, stored, transcoded and streamed to whoever opens the link. Storage and bandwidth grow with every user, and they never stop growing, because old videos keep sitting there. That is why tools like Loom charge per user per month, and why their free plans are tight.

Most of Dolly does not work like that. Recording, editing and export all happen on your Mac. Your Mac does the rendering with its own hardware encoder. When you export a video, the electricity is yours and the cost to us is close to zero. So we can give that part away, properly: no time limit, no video count, the whole editor.

The one thing that does cost us money every month is hosting. A Dolly link means we store your video and stream it to everyone who opens it. That is where the plans draw the line.

What Free includes

Unlimited recording, with no time limit and no video count.
The full editor: auto zoom, the redrawn cursor, backgrounds and frames, Auto edit, a Transcript tab that removes ums and long pauses, a teleprompter, and drawing on screen while you record.
Camera and microphone, in sync with your screen.
Export up to 1080p, with a small Made with Dolly logo in the corner.
Quick Share as often as you like: press Stop and the video is on your clipboard.
Up to 10 active Dolly links. A link nobody has watched for 90 days is archived, and you can restore it within 30 days.

The logo is how Free pays its way: when someone likes your video, they can find out how it was made. Watch pages of free links also show a small "Make your own video — free" button.

What Pro pays for

Pro is €9.99 a month or €59 a year. It removes the logo and adds 4K at 60 fps and GIF export. The rest is mostly about links, because links are what cost us money: unlimited Dolly links with stats, a password and expiry date per link, and your own button and branding on the watch page.

Pro also includes Connect your AI. Dolly speaks MCP, so Claude, Claude Code or Cursor can drive it: ask for a demo and your AI records, cuts and exports it, or ask for explainer videos of your app and it plans and records a narrated series. It still runs on your Mac; the AI you use runs on its own terms with its own provider. You can read how to set it up.

A subscription is the honest price here, because hosting is a cost that recurs. If you don't need hosted links, you don't need to subscribe.

Lifetime, for people who'd rather pay once

Lifetime is €99, once (€49 for the first 500 founders). It covers everything that runs on your Mac, forever: no logo, 4K at 60 fps, GIF, Connect your AI and Quick Share, with every future update. Hosted links beyond what Free includes stay part of Pro, because they are the one thing we pay for every month.

Subscription fatigue is real, and earned

You probably pay for more subscriptions than you would like. Screen recording is a good example. Screen Studio, the tool that made polished Mac recordings popular, costs $29 a month or $108 a year, and exporting needs a paid plan. On 1 October 2025 it stopped selling its one-time license to new customers (AlternativeTo). In fairness, existing owners kept their licenses, and Screen Studio is an excellent, deep product made by a small team. But the reaction in comment threads is telling: people called $29 a month "unusually and extremely expensive for a video recorder app", and one user said they had used it "maybe 2-3 times over the course of 3 months".

Others in the same thread defended the price as worth it for people who ship videos often, and that is fair. But most people do not record demos every day. They record a launch video, a few tutorials, a bug walkthrough for a client. That is exactly who Free is for.

Subscriptions can also be hard to leave. In June 2024 the US government sued Adobe over hidden early-termination fees and a difficult cancellation process (AlternativeTo); Adobe said it would fight the claims. That is why Dolly has a one-time option at all, and why Pro cancels in a click.

What we promise

Free stays free. No time limit, no expiry date, no paywall at the export button.

Lifetime means lifetime. If you buy Lifetime, it keeps working and keeps getting every update to what it covers. We will not turn it into a subscription or ask you to pay again for the same thing.

Early buyers keep what they bought. If you bought Dolly under an earlier price, your license keeps everything it included, for good.

Refund within 30 days, no questions asked. If Dolly is not for you, write to us within 30 days and you get your money back.

No account to record. Recording, editing and export never need you to sign up.

The short version

Dolly's free plan is generous because recording and editing run on your Mac, and that costs us almost nothing per user. Hosting videos does cost money every month, so hosted links beyond Free's ten, with stats and branding, are Pro. If that sounds fair, download Dolly, use it free, and pay when it earns its place.