What happens when a screenwriting app trial ends

When Beatstack's fifteen-day trial ended, the only thing that changed was whether you got free AI passes. Every project still opened, read, exported and saved.

So we decided what "expired" should mean. After the trial, reading and saving still work. Only new edits stop, and the draft you already have stays whole.

One gate stood in the way of that, and it was luck: every change already passed through a single door, so there was never a list of features to remember to close. The first version of the gate was too eager. Undo and restoring a save point go through the same door, so a trial ending mid-sentence could trap you inside the paragraph you were fixing. Now the gate asks what you are trying to do. Editing is gated. Getting yourself out of trouble never is.

It also fails open. An unreadable licence reads as unknown, never expired. Every failure leans the same way: toward you keeping the work.

The clock can run out. The pages stay yours.

Update: superseded the next day. See [the wall](/blog/skipping-the-free-trial-was-the-exploit).