Yes, HackMD has a permanent free tier alongside its paid plans. The free plan includes 3 invitees, 3 custom templates, and 20 GitHub pushes per month. FreeTier.co estimates the free tier at about $3.00/mo, and no credit card is required to sign up.
About
HackMD is a collaborative Markdown workspace for teams, communities, and projects. It provides real-time editing with multiple cursors, comments and mentions, version history, templates, GitHub integration, public notes, shared workspaces, embeds, slide mode, and a REST API or CLI for reading and pushing Markdown content.
The free plan includes unlimited notes, up to 3 invitees or teammates, 3 custom templates, suggest edit, GitHub integration with 20 pushes per month, custom note permalinks, and image uploads up to 1MB per image. The pricing page also lists 400 API calls per month on Free, with recent 10 versions and 3-day trash retention.
Free Tier Value
This free tier is genuinely usable and perpetual, with unlimited notes and a small collaboration allowance, but it is capped on teammates, versions, GitHub pushes, image size, and API calls. Since the cheapest paid plan is Prime at $5 per seat/month, the free offering feels worth about 60% of that—roughly $3/month—because it covers the core workflow but leaves out the pro limits that matter for active teams.
What's included in the free tier
Verified
- Unlimited notes
- 3 invitees
- 3 custom templates
- Suggest edit
- GitHub integration
- 20 GitHub pushes per month
- Customize permalink to your note
- Upload up to 1MB per image
- Up to 3 teammates
- Recent 10 versions
- Trash can timeframe of 3 days
- 400 API calls per month
- Knowledge base community and standard email support
- Published notes for Note Insights
See HackMD pricing for current limits.
Paid plans
Prime
- seat
- 1
- image upload size
- 20MB
- API calls per month
- 20,000
- Full-text search
- Upload up to 20MB per image
- PDF export
- Unlimited invites
- Unlimited versions
- Unlimited GitHub pushes
- Unlimited custom templates
- 20K API calls per month
Enterprise
- Role-based access control
- SSO (SAML, LDAP, customized) login
- Custom domain
- Custom homepage
- GitLab integration
- Custom payment methods
- Dedicated account manager
Pricing extracted from HackMD's pricing page. Always verify current pricing before committing.
Common questions
Is HackMD free forever?
Yes. HackMD has a permanent free tier alongside its paid plans, though the allowance typically resets each month.
Does HackMD require a credit card?
No. You can start on HackMD's free tier without entering card details.
What happens when you exceed HackMD's free tier?
You move to a paid plan. HackMD's cheapest paid plan is Prime at $5 / seat / month.
What is HackMD's free tier worth?
HackMD's free tier is worth about $3.00 per month. That maps to an FTV score of 52/100. The FTV score is explained at freetier.co/ftv.
