AI Access and Your Plan: Why MCP Needs a Paid Plan

In brief: MCP access requires an active trial or a paid plan; free tier workspaces are declined, and your connection resumes when a plan returns.

Applies to: Anyone connecting their own AI client. Only an Owner can restore a lapsed plan.

See also: Connect Your Own AI to Net Net with the MCP Server covers what the connection is, When a Trial Ends or a Payment Fails: What Happens Next covers everything else a lapse changes, and Net Net Pricing: Free Tier, 60-Day Trial, and Paid Plans covers the plans themselves.

Connecting your own AI over MCP requires an active trial or a paid plan. It is not part of the free tier, and it is not planned to be. Your 60 day trial gives you full MCP access and starts the first time you activate a Job, not when you sign up. If the trial ends without a paid plan, the workspace returns to free and Net Net stops answering your assistant, though the connection itself stays configured in your AI tool and starts working again the moment you are on an active plan. Nothing you built is deleted at any point.

You will find your plan under Settings → Billing.

This article covers only what your plan means for AI access. The pricing itself, including what an active Job costs and how annual works, is in Net Net Pricing: Free Tier, 60-Day Trial, and Paid Plans. What the connection actually is, and what an assistant can do once it has one, is in Connect Your Own AI to Net Net with the MCP Server.

The MCP access rule, stated plainly

MCP access requires an active trial or a paid plan. Free tier workspaces are declined.

That is not a soft limit or a reduced allowance. Net Net checks your workspace status when your assistant asks a question, and a workspace on the free tier does not get an answer.

The free tier itself is real and permanent. Workspace, contacts, Quick Tasks, and My Lists stay available forever, without a card and without an expiry date. Connecting your own AI is simply not one of the things it includes.

During your trial

Your trial runs 60 days and gives you full MCP access for all of it.

The detail people miss is when the clock starts. It does not start at signup. It starts the first time you activate a Job. Planning a Job costs nothing and burns no trial days, so you can take as long as you like getting the shape of the work right before anything is on the clock. Activating Your Free 60-Day Trial: When the Clock Starts covers that boundary.

Whether a card is required depends on the email address you signed up with. Business domain signups start the trial without one. Signups from the common free email providers, such as gmail and outlook, are asked for a card before the first Job can be activated, because half the internet shares those domains and the card is what keeps the trial from being farmed.

A card held for the trial is not charged when the trial ends. It is there to start the trial and to deter abuse, and nothing converts on its own.

When the trial ends

Nothing converts automatically. If you do not choose a paid plan before day 60, Net Net does not charge you and does not upgrade you. The workspace returns to the free tier.

Three things follow from that, and they are worth reading carefully.

Your Active and Completed Jobs are archived. They are not deleted. They are moved out of the working set, the way any archived Job is, and what each of those states means is set out in Job Lifecycle: Pending, Active, Completed, Archived.

Your data stays exactly where it is. Nothing is removed, nothing is purged, nothing is held hostage. Your workspace, contacts, Quick Tasks, and My Lists carry on as the permanent free tier.

Your AI stops getting answers. This is the one that surprises people, because the connector still sits in their AI tool looking perfectly healthy. It is not broken. Net Net is simply declining its requests, because the workspace is now on the free tier.

The full picture of the trial ending is in When a Trial Ends or a Payment Fails: What Happens Next.

When a payment fails

A failed payment does not switch anything off on the day it fails.

What happens is that Net Net marks the invoice failed, emails the owner of the workspace about it, and begins retrying automatically. Those retries run daily, and they run inside a 10 day grace period rather than after it. So roughly ten attempts fall inside the window while you still have your workspace.

Owner is a specific role rather than a figure of speech, and what each role can see and do is set out in User Roles Explained: Owner, Admin, Lead, and Member.

Updating the card during that window is the fix. The next retry picks up the new payment method, and a successful payment returns the workspace to active.

If a payment fails, the email goes to the workspace owner rather than to everyone. If your assistant suddenly stops getting answers and nobody knows why, that email is the first place to look.

If the grace period runs out

If ten days pass without a successful payment, Net Net suspends the workspace. This is operational rather than cosmetic.

Suspension forces the plan back to free, archives Active and Completed Jobs, and marks open draft invoices as failed. It also switches off the automatic retries, which is the part that matters for getting back: after suspension, nothing recovers on its own. It takes a deliberate step from you.

MCP access ends with everything else. A suspended workspace is on the free tier, and free tier workspaces are declined.

Two things do not happen. Your data is not deleted. And your AI connections are not torn down at the far end, so you will not need to rebuild them from scratch.

Getting back

During the grace period, update your payment method under Settings → Billing. The daily retry does the rest, and access returns with the successful payment.

After suspension, choose a paid plan again from Settings → Billing. Because automatic retries have stopped, this is a deliberate action rather than something that resolves itself.

Your existing AI connection should start answering again on its own. There is no separate step to reconnect your assistant. The connector in your AI tool was never removed, and Net Net checks your plan status per request, so an active plan means the next question gets an answer.

If a workspace has been suspended for a while and you are not certain what state it came back in, ask your assistant which workspace it is connected to and what it can see. That is the fastest way to confirm the connection is live again.

One thing worth confirming with us directly rather than assuming: what happens to Jobs that were archived during a lapse. Your data is preserved and nothing is deleted, but whether previously archived Jobs return to your active view on reactivation is not something this article will promise. Ask before you plan around it.

Frequently Asked Questions

Will MCP ever come to the free tier?

No. This is a settled decision rather than a roadmap item. The free tier exists so that a workspace, its contacts, and its small captures stay available to you permanently at no cost. Connecting your own AI sits with the trial and the paid plans.

Does using MCP cost me anything extra with Net Net?

No. Net Net does not charge for MCP access beyond requiring an active trial or paid plan, and does not bill you for model usage. Net Net is not running a model for you, so every token is spent with your own AI provider under whatever plan you already have with them.

Is there a limit on how many questions my AI can ask?

Net Net does not currently meter how much you use the connection. The practical limits you will run into are your AI provider's, not ours, since you are spending their capacity rather than ours.

My connector looks fine but my AI gets nothing back. Is it broken?

Check your plan before you check the connector. A workspace that has returned to the free tier will decline MCP requests while the connector still appears correctly configured in your AI tool, which reads exactly like a broken integration and is not one. Everything else worth checking is in Setting Up the MCP Server in Claude, ChatGPT, and More.

If I cancel, do I have to disconnect my AI?

No, and there is nothing to clean up on the Net Net side. Requests simply stop being answered. If you would rather remove the connector anyway, do it from your AI tool's settings. Canceling is covered in How to Cancel Your Subscription and Go Back to Free.

Does adding teammates who use MCP cost more?

No. Net Net is priced by active Job, never per seat. Every member of your workspace can connect their own assistant, each carrying their own permissions, and the price does not move. See Teammates and Billing: Why Adding People Costs Nothing.

If the connection is not set up yet, Setting Up the MCP Server in Claude, ChatGPT, and More has the steps for each provider, and What to Ask Your AI About Your Net Net Workspace shows what you get for the trouble once it is running. Before you commit to a paid plan, Annual Plans and Volume Discounts: How Prepaid Jobs Work is worth reading, since the way you pay changes what the same set of active Jobs costs you. And if a lapse has already happened, When a Trial Ends or a Payment Fails: What Happens Next covers everything outside AI access that changes with it.

Updated on: 08/04/2026

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