Is there a trial that turns into a subscription

No. There is no plan, no card on file and nothing to cancel, so there is nothing that can renew.

Which designs are free

All 37 of them, plus every cover letter design and every portfolio design. None is marked premium and none is locked.

Is the download free as well

Yes, in both formats, with no watermark. The usual paid-builder pattern of free editing and a charged download does not exist here.

Then what pays for it

It is free with nothing held back, and the honest reason it can be is that it costs little to run. No language model is called anywhere in the product, so there is no per-visitor bill.

Are there any limits at all

The public endpoints are rate-limited so one caller cannot saturate them, for example sixty ATS checks and twelve PDF renders in five minutes from one address. They are saturation guards, and a person working on a résumé will not meet them.

How-to · Without

How to make a résumé without paying anything

No card, no trial that renews, and no fee at the download step. This page lists what free covers here, and says what the limits actually are.

ConxfolioPublished 2026-09-12

— free, and the whole thing.

The Conxfolio résumé editor with the rendered page beside the content column — The editor. There is no locked section and no upgrade prompt in it.

Most free résumé builders are free until the moment the file matters. You write the document, you pick the layout, and the download button opens a plan chooser. The work is real, the paywall is at the end of it, and by then leaving is expensive in effort.

This page states what is free here, because a claim like that is only worth anything if it is specific.

The four tools, all of them

The résumé builder, the ATS checker, the cover letter builder and the portfolio builder are free, in full. No tool is a teaser for another one, and none of them has a section that opens a plan chooser.

Every design

37 résumé designs, 21 of them marked ATS-safe. 12 cover letter designs across 5 families. 20 portfolio designs across 6 directions. None carries a premium badge, because there is no premium. A gallery where a third of the cards are locked is a shop, and the gallery here is a gallery.

Both exports, and no watermark

The Download menu offering PDF and DOCX — The whole export menu. Two formats, no third option that asks for a card.

PDF for sending and DOCX for editing elsewhere. The exported PDF from the measured run was inspected afterwards with a text extractor and contained no brand name, no watermark string and no trial marking anywhere in the file. The DOCX was a three-entry zip with no document properties at all. The checking is written up on the no-watermark page, with the commands used.

No account, so no card

There is no sign-up, which removes the ordinary place a card is collected. The one exception is deliberate and is not a payment: claiming the public address of a published portfolio sends a one-time code to an email address, because a public address has to belong to somebody. Nothing else in the product asks for an email, and nothing at all asks for a card.

Why it can be free

The answer is architectural rather than generous. Conxfolio calls no language model anywhere. The readers that parse your document are deterministic code, the score is arithmetic over rules, and the letter engine selects sentences out of your own résumé rather than generating them. A product with no per-visitor inference bill does not need to meter people to survive, which is the whole of it.

The limits, stated

There are rate limits on the public endpoints, and they are worth naming so nobody discovers them and assumes a paywall. Sixty ATS checks, forty letter drafts and twelve PDF renders in five minutes from one address, with similar guards on the import routes. They exist so a single caller cannot saturate a shared service. Working on your own application, you will not come near them. The reasoning is set out in rate limits are not usage meters.

The other limit is that work lives in your browser. That is a privacy property and a cost: clear your browser data and the draft is gone, with no copy on a server to restore it from. Exporting a file is the backup, which is covered in moving a résumé between devices.

What free does not mean

It does not mean the tools do more than they do. The checker is a measurement of structure and evidence, not an employer's applicant tracking system, and it predicts nothing about an outcome. The builder does not invent work history. The letter does not claim a skill your résumé does not show. Free changes the price, and it does not change what any of them is.

If you want to see how that compares with a paid builder's free tier, the resume.io comparison quotes their own published plan page rather than characterising it.

How to tell a free tool from a free trial

Three questions answer it before you invest an hour. Does the export button ask for anything. Are any designs marked premium in the gallery. Does the tool ask for a card at any point, including behind a free trial. If the answer to all three is no, the tool is free; if the answer to any is yes, the work you do now is what they will charge you for later.

Ask the same questions here and the answers are no, no and no, and every one of them is checkable in a few minutes without creating anything. The comparison shelf asks those questions of other tools using their own published pages, with the links, so you can read the source rather than our summary of it.

The rest of the application, also free

The three tools beside the builder cost nothing either, and each is a complete thing rather than a preview. The checker reads the file and prints the multiplication behind its score. The letter builder writes from evidence and traces every proof paragraph to a line, described on writing a cover letter without an account. The portfolio builder produces a real page with an address you can claim.

Being able to run all four without paying is what makes the honest comparison possible. Do the work once, take the files, and decide afterwards whether another tool is worth a subscription, with your own document as the test rather than a marketing page.

Start without a card

Every design, both export formats, the ATS check and the letter. Free, with nothing held back for a paid tier.

Open the résumé builder Read the ATS report first

Questions

Is there a trial that turns into a subscription: No. There is no plan, no card on file and nothing to cancel, so there is nothing that can renew.
Which designs are free: All 37 of them, plus every cover letter design and every portfolio design. None is marked premium and none is locked.
Is the download free as well: Yes, in both formats, with no watermark. The usual paid-builder pattern of free editing and a charged download does not exist here.
Then what pays for it: It is free with nothing held back, and the honest reason it can be is that it costs little to run. No language model is called anywhere in the product, so there is no per-visitor bill.
Are there any limits at all: The public endpoints are rate-limited so one caller cannot saturate them, for example sixty ATS checks and twelve PDF renders in five minutes from one address. They are saturation guards, and a person working on a résumé will not meet them.

Conxfolio is a free set of four career tools: a résumé builder with 37 rendered layouts, an ATS résumé checker that prints its own arithmetic, a cover letter builder that traces every proof paragraph back to the line it came from, and a portfolio builder with 20 authored designs. There is no account to create, nothing is held back for a paid plan, and no language model is used anywhere in the product, so the readers, the score and the letter are deterministic code you can check.