Why NamesRanker is premium-only (and proud of it)
A free tier would quietly fail the very people it's meant to help. Here's why we'd rather charge a fair price and run an engine that actually ranks your name.
The question we get most isn't 'how does it work?' — it's 'why isn't any of it free?' Fair question. Most of the web is free, and name pages used to be our free product too. Here's the honest answer, and why we changed it.
Ranking a name is a machine, not a page
A page is cheap to serve. An engine is not. To actually move your name on Google, someone has to study you continuously, transform and publish your works, pitch you to third parties, and track your results — every week, for months. That machine runs whether or not you're looking, and it has real costs: infrastructure, platform integrations, outreach, and the care that keeps it from ever becoming spam.
A free tier can't honestly run that machine. It either degrades the service until it stops working, or it finds sneaky ways to monetize the free users — and we decided we'd rather not do either.
Free tiers quietly fail the people they attract
The cruelest version of freemium is the one that looks generous: a free product that does just enough to attract people who need the real thing, then nudges them into a maze of upgrade screens. That's not generosity — it's a bait-and-switch with extra steps. We'd rather be honest on page one: this is a paid service, it costs a fair price, and here's a trial that lets you verify it works on your own name before you commit.
The people who need this already know what it's worth
If you've ever searched your own name and found a stranger's profile, an outdated directory, or a decade-old social account answering for you, you know exactly what it's worth to fix that. Our members aren't being upsold into caring about their name — they arrived caring. The product respects that by being direct about what it costs and what it does.
What we promise instead of free
- A $1 trial with seven full days of everything — not a crippled preview.
- One plan with every feature in it — no tier ladders, no 'contact sales'.
- Launch pricing at $9/month for early members (standard $29/month after the launch window).
- A weekly report card so you always know what the engine did and what it's doing next.
- Cancel anytime — your data, page, and published work stay yours.
We built the machine we'd want working on our own names. It's not free, and that's the point — it's worth paying for because it actually runs.