A free PMO tool for life: what ClearPMO gives you free, and what you pay for

Many project tools charge per person, and their free plans are limited by the number of users or by a trial period. That makes it risky to start: the real cost only shows up once the whole team depends on the tool.

ClearPMO works the other way round. The tool itself is free, on every project, with no end date. What you pay for is the layer that saves a project manager time: AI and a set of advanced features. You choose which projects get that layer, and you can remove it again.

What "free for life" means here

It is a plan, called Base, not a trial. In practice:

• Every project starts on Base and can stay there. There is no trial clock and nothing to cancel.
• No card is needed to sign up. You sign in with a code sent to your email.
• There is no limit on team members. Pricing is never per person.
• You can run as many free projects as you need.
• If a paid project goes back to Base, the project and its data stay. The paid features switch off, the plan you built does not disappear.

What is in the free plan

Base is meant to run a real project from kickoff to close, not to demonstrate one:

• Scope, out of scope and a timeline.
• Milestones with target dates.
• Tasks in a list or on a Kanban board, with an owner, due date, priority and status.
• Task blockers and project dependencies.
• A risk register with impact and likelihood.
• A team roster, with invitations by email and @mentions in task comments.
• An audit trail of who changed what.
• A guided setup that shows a new project manager what to fill in first.

What you pay for: AI and the advanced features

Premium is bought per project, at CHF 69 per month or CHF 690 per year. It adds the work an assistant would otherwise do for the project manager, plus the features a more formal project needs:

• Robin, an AI agent you can ask about the project in plain language.
• AI drafting of scope, milestones, risks and dependencies from a description or a document, and voice dictation.
• Daily reminder emails to task owners, a daily summary and a weekly digest for the PM.
• AI suggestions for which tasks block each other, and bulk import of tasks.
• Compliance Mgt and the Decision Log.
• Resource Management: weekly allocations, task estimates and velocity.

Program Management is a separate plan for people who lead several projects together, at CHF 149 per program per month or CHF 1490 per year. It adds the cross-project dashboard, the program structure view, the risk heat map, the owner view, program financials and the program's own milestones, tasks, risks and dependencies. A program needs this plan before it can be used; the projects inside it can still be free.

Not everything on the paid plans is AI. Compliance Mgt, the Decision Log, Resource Management and Financials are paid features that do not depend on AI. The principle is the same: the core tool is free, the extra layer is paid.

Why the price is per project, not per person

Per-seat pricing punishes the behavior a PMO wants. Every extra stakeholder, contractor or reviewer you invite makes the bill bigger, so teams start sharing logins or keeping people out of the plan.

With pricing per project or per program, inviting the whole team costs nothing extra. A ten-person project and a sixty-person project pay the same for Premium, and nothing at all on Base.

How to use it without overpaying

A pattern that works for most teams:

• Put every project on Base first. Get the scope, milestones, owners and risks in.
• Upgrade only the projects where the admin load is real: many tasks, many owners, a sponsor who wants weekly updates.
• Leave small or slow projects on Base.
• When an upgraded project winds down, cancel its plan. It keeps the paid features until the end of the period already paid for, then returns to Base.

What free does not include

To be clear about the limits: Base has no AI, no automatic reminder emails, no Compliance Mgt, no Decision Log, no Resource Management and no program-level views. ClearPMO also has no time tracking and no integrations marketplace on any plan today. If those are the things you need most, check them before you commit.