Plans & limits

Surfc has two plans: Reader and Practitioner. Reader is genuinely usable on its own — the limits are there so that heavy automated use has somewhere to go, not to make the core product feel locked.

What's on the Reader plan

The Reader plan includes:

• 50 managed-AI calls per month — your monthly allowance for AI features (see below)
• All 102 ideas in the canon — the full idea system, not a subset
• 10 custom ideas of your own
• Up to 2 linked devices
• 500 MB of image storage for your captured photos
• Cloud sync, Readwise import, Kindle import, and JSON export — all included, no upsell

For most readers indexing a few pages at a time, Reader comfortably covers normal use.

How the AI allowance works

Transcription (reading the text out of a photo) and idea discovery (suggesting which ideas a note connects to) both draw from one shared monthly budget — 50 calls a month on Reader. They don't have separate counters: thirty transcriptions and twenty discoveries together reach the same limit as fifty of either.

The count resets each month. You can always see roughly where you stand from the Usage this month bar on your Profile screen.

The limit only pauses AI — never your notes

Reaching the monthly limit stops AI processing until the next reset. It never blocks you from capturing or saving. You keep writing notes and tagging ideas by hand; only the automatic transcription and suggestions pause.

When you hit the limit, the transcription or discovery step simply doesn't run and Surfc tells you why. Saving the note, editing it, tagging it manually, syncing, and export all keep working exactly as before.

What Practitioner adds

Practitioner is the plan for readers who index heavily or want the AI to keep working through saved notes:

• Unlimited custom ideas
• Unlimited linked devices
• 5 GB of image storage
• Re-discover ideas on saved notes — re-run discovery across notes you saved earlier, not just at capture time. This is the capability that's exclusive to Practitioner.
• 2,000 managed-AI calls per month — a much larger allowance than the 50-call Reader budget, built for heavy indexing (see the note below)

About the Practitioner AI allowance

The 2,000-call allowance applies automatically the moment your upgrade takes effect — there's nothing to claim. We set it at 2,000 simply because the system needs a number, not because it's a hard ceiling we expect you to hit. If you index heavily enough to approach it, email hello@surfc.app and we'll happily raise it for your account.

Upgrading

If you're on Reader, your Profile screen shows an Upgrade to Practitioner button, and the Your plan section in Settings is the place to manage your plan. Upgrading opens the current pricing — the live plans page always has the up-to-date price and billing options, so it's the source of truth rather than this article.

Upgrading takes effect without signing out, and your existing notes, devices, and encryption are completely unaffected — Practitioner changes your allowances, nothing about your data.

Stretching the Reader allowance

If you're close to the monthly limit, batching pays off: capture freely, then run a focused review session over your recent notes instead of transcribing each one the moment you take the photo. You often make better idea connections with a little distance anyway.

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See also:

• Sync, offline & multi-device — how device limits and linking work
• Idea discovery — what the AI allowance is spent on
• Export & data ownership — your data is yours on every plan
• Guardrails — what the AI will and won't do with your notes