Pricing

What Family Synapse costs: the free trial, the pay-what-it-is-worth subscription, how to cancel, and what happens when the trial ends.

Status: Live / built. Verified against lib/billing.js, lib/trial.js and lib/billing-routes.js on 2026-09-27. Self-service cancellation via the Stripe customer portal was added the same day, superseding an earlier note in this document that said cancelling required contacting Synapse. Figures here are the defaults in code; each is overridable by an environment variable, so if a number ever looks wrong, the code is the authority and this document is stale.

The Trial

Family Synapse is free to start, and no card is required to begin.

20 sessions, not 20 days (TRIAL_SESSION_LIMIT, lib/trial.js:49). The allowance is usage-based, not time-limited — a family that uses it twice a month still has their full runway six months later.
A session is a block of activity by one child, separated from the next by a 30-minute idle gap. The allowance is a family-level pool: two siblings working at once spend two sessions.
When the allowance runs out, an in-progress conversation is never cut off mid-way. The pause lands at the start of the next session.

What the Child Is Told, and What the Parent Sees

This distinction matters and is easy to get wrong.

A child is never told anything about money. When the allowance is gone, Aria says exactly one fixed sentence — "Let's pick this up again soon — ask your parent to check in." (PAUSE_MESSAGE, lib/trial.js:53). It is a constant, not something the model composes. Money, subscriptions, trials and account state are never mentioned to a child, and the child's chat is deliberately not a place where payment is discussed.

The parent is flagged separately, on the parent dashboard (families.trial_ended_at). The commercial conversation happens there, with the parent, not in the child's tutoring session.

Pay What You Think It's Worth

When a parent chooses to subscribe, they name the amount. It then becomes their ongoing monthly subscription, charged automatically by Stripe.

Minimum $10 USD per month (AMOUNT_FLOOR_CENTS, default 1000). Currency is USD, not NZD.
Suggested $15 (AMOUNT_SUGGESTED_CENTS, default 1500) — offered as a starting point.
Maximum $500 (AMOUNT_MAX_CENTS, default 50000), a sanity cap rather than a target.

The reason for the floor is stated to parents in these words, and it is worth repeating as written rather than paraphrasing into something softer:

> Every family costs us real money in AI and speech services, so the lowest we can run a family > account for is $10 a month. Anything at or above that is entirely up to you.

Families in difficult financial circumstances are meant to pay the minimum; that is what the floor is for. Families who find real value are invited to reflect that. Nothing in the product treats the two differently — the amount buys identical access.

Managing or Cancelling a Subscription

Families can manage or cancel at any time, themselves, from the parent dashboard. No email, no waiting on a reply.

The dashboard's Account section has a Manage subscription link. It opens Stripe's own hosted customer portal, where a parent can change their card, read past invoices, or cancel.
Cancelling is self-service and takes effect without anyone at Synapse being involved.
The link only appears once there is a subscription to manage — a family still on the free sessions has nothing to show there.
A parent is asked for their recovery code first. This is the same bar as starting a payment, and the reason is the same: a browser someone else is already signed into should not be enough to change or cancel the money on a family's account. Worth mentioning if a parent asks how to cancel, so the prompt is expected rather than alarming.
It is a parent action. A session narrowed to a child profile cannot reach it.

School Accounts Are Separate

A school account is a different product with its own billing, and it is free to the school. If a child's school provides Synapse, that access does not require a family subscription and is not affected by one. The two account types share no rows, no keys and no billing.

What Is NOT Claimed Here

Several things are commonly assumed about pricing and are not true of the product as built. Do not state them:

Aria does not open a payment conversation with anyone. See above — she says one fixed sentence to the child and nothing else.
Aria cannot tell a parent what other families pay. No such feature exists, and it would sit awkwardly against the privacy model. The suggested $15 is the only guidance offered.
No comparison to tutoring rates. Do not state what private tutoring costs in New Zealand or anywhere else. It is not a figure this repository can verify, and an invented or half-remembered market rate presented as fact is exactly the kind of claim the operating rules forbid.
Do not enumerate features as "included in the subscription". Social Resilience and Director are pilot features whose future is undecided (see Social Resilience, Director Tab (AI Literacy)), and listing them as guaranteed inclusions would promise something that may be withdrawn. What is safe to say: a family subscription covers every child on the account, and there are no in-app purchases and no advertising.

The Short Answer

If a parent simply asks what it costs: free for 20 sessions with no card, then the parent decides what it is worth from $10 USD a month, charged monthly. That is the honest whole answer, and it does not need embellishing.