How does the free trial work?
Updated September 2026
The trial on each of the three plans is seven days and nothing is charged on the first one. On day four, in the evening, the phone reminds you that the trial is ending; on day seven the plan you chose renews at its own price. The trial is an entitlement like any other, so you can seal your commitment during it and the block holds from the seal. What the trial pays for is the app, not the term: your subscription and your commitment have different end dates and neither one moves the other.
Seven days, and three moments in them
Each of the three plans Fold'em sells carries the same introductory offer: seven days at no charge before the first payment. Nothing is taken on the day you start, and the price after that is whichever plan you picked. The invite variant of a plan is the exception: it carries one free month instead of seven days, and the paywall shows that trio only once a redeemed invite code is applied.
On day four the phone raises a reminder in the evening. Day four is not a fixed number typed into the screen; it is the trial's length less a lead of three days, floored so it can never land on the day you bought. The same rule drives the reminder itself, which is why the timeline on the paywall and the notification that actually arrives cannot fall on different days.
On day seven the plan renews, and Apple charges the card on file. Renewal is a subscription event and not a commitment event: the term you sealed carries on either way.
What the paywall states
The screen shows the same three moments as a line before it shows a price: the wall goes up today, the reminder lands, the renewal starts. Below that sit the plan lengths, and the button carries the trial's own length rather than a fixed phrase, because the app renders whatever the App Store says the product's introductory offer is. If a product ever shipped with no trial, the button and the timeline would say so instead of promising one.
The paywall, with the trial timeline above the plans
The reminder comes from the phone, not from us
The trial reminder is scheduled on the phone that bought, by the app, at the moment the purchase succeeds, and only when the product bought actually carried an introductory free trial. No server sends it, and nothing about it travels anywhere.
It fires in the evening, local time, and states the end fact and nothing else: your free trial ends on a named weekday, and there is nothing to do. It says that much because it is true whether or not you have already cancelled, so the reminder never has to guess at what you intend. If your entitlement changes, the pending reminder is cancelled and scheduled again the next time the app comes to the foreground.
How it arrives depends on one answer you gave during setup. Fold'em asks once for full notification permission at a declinable beat; if you allowed it, the reminder appears on your lock screen, and if you did not, it lands quietly in Notification Center with no sound and no banner. Either way it is the same reminder, and the switch that governs it is the single Notifications row in Settings.
The plan is not the term
These are two separate things with two separate end dates, and confusing them is the most common misreading of the whole product. The plan is a subscription of one, three or twelve months, billed by Apple, which you can change or cancel in your Apple settings at any time. The term is the commitment you sealed: ongoing with no end date, or a fixed date you chose. Buying a twelve month plan does not set a twelve month term, and sealing an ongoing term does not sign you up for anything longer than the plan you bought.
If you cancel during the trial
Cancelling is done in your Apple settings and Fold'em is not asked. It turns auto renewal off, so the trial runs to its end and the plan does not renew. What happens to the block afterwards is not nothing: protection needs both a live subscription and a standing commitment, so when the entitlement ends the server opens a lapse window of 72 hours and then releases the shields, and your keyholder is told with the date protection would end. Renewing inside that window keeps everything where it was.
What this does not do
The trial does not shorten, lengthen or unlock a term, and cancelling it is not a route out of one: the lapse window is the server's and runs on its own clock, so cancelling never opens anything sooner than 72 hours after the entitlement actually ends. Fold'em cannot cancel a subscription for you, cannot issue a refund and cannot see your payment details, because all three belong to Apple. It also cannot extend a trial; the length is set on the product in the App Store and the app only renders what the store reports.
Still stuck? Email support@foldem.app and we answer within two working days.