Key takeaway
A free tier that caps you at a handful of tasks was never free, it was a length-limited trial wearing a free label.
A team under ten people searching for a free project management tool is usually not looking for a permanently limited toy, they are looking for something that will genuinely run a real project without a card on file, because the budget for software is either zero or already spoken for. The word "free" gets used for two very different things in this space, and it is worth being able to tell them apart before you build a project on top of one.
Two different things called "free"
One version is a real, complete tier: the core of the product, usable indefinitely, with no expiry, that happens not to include the features that cost the vendor real money to run, AI usage, outbound email, and so on. The other is a time-boxed or artificially crippled trial dressed up as a free plan, capped at a small number of tasks or a short window, designed to convert you rather than actually serve a small project long term. The first is worth building on. The second is a sales funnel, and treating it as a stable foundation for a real project is how a team ends up migrating off it three months in, at the worst possible time to migrate.
What ClearPMO's free tier actually is
ClearPMO's Base plan is free, on every project, with no time limit: scope, milestones, dependencies and risk tracking, tasks in a row or Kanban view, and a team roster added by email or by uploading a spreadsheet you already have. What is not included at that tier is what actually costs money to run behind the scenes: AI assisted drafting from a description or an uploaded document, bulk task import from a file, and the daily reminder emails that chase overdue tasks automatically. Those sit behind a CHF 69 per project per month upgrade (or CHF 690 a year), applied per project rather than per account, so a small team is never paying for a seat count, only for the specific projects where the paid features are actually worth it.