What Changes on 1 September, and What Stays Free

Two things change over the next fortnight, and one thing does not change at all. The one that does not change is the important one, so let me put it first.

Every Shariah verdict on ShariaQuant stays free. In full. Permanently. All screened cryptocurrencies, the ones we rate Halal and the ones we rate Haram, all the tokenized stocks, the airdrop and presale screenings, the reasoning behind each ruling, the scholar sources, the full methodology. No account, no card, no plan. That was never the paid part and it isn't becoming the paid part.

Now the things that do change.

The two dates

21 August. The last day of five free AI research credits a month. Anyone who signs up after it gets one full research run when they create their account, and that's the whole grant. If you already have an account, you keep your monthly allowance. Nothing is taken from anyone who already has it.

1 September. Three tools that are open to everyone today move onto plans: fundamental analysis, the Quant Score, and the Supply and Demand Index beyond Bitcoin.

Free does not lose all three, and this part changed after I first wrote it. Bitcoin, Ethereum and BNB keep their fundamental analysis and their Quant Score on a free account, permanently. A free account should still be able to look something up properly rather than hit a wall on the first click, and those are the three coins people actually arrive asking about.

Bitcoin's Supply and Demand reading stays free. All four timeframes, the zones with their actual prices, the whole panel. One coin, free forever, because it's the one everybody starts with and I want people to see what the tool does before deciding whether it's worth paying for.

Why the free allowance ended

I'll give you the actual number rather than a vague line about costs.

Every deep AI research run costs us $0.3058 in compute. That's one asset, screened properly: property status, the three prohibitions, revenue purity, debt thresholds, the fundamentals section, the lot. At five free runs a month across the accounts we have now, that's $68.81 a month and $825.75 a year, spent on accounts with no revenue behind them and no ceiling as more people join.

The uncomfortable part is that it gets worse precisely when things go well. A thousand free accounts on that allowance is over $18,000 a year in compute. The better this platform does, the faster that bill grows, and it comes out of the same budget that pays for the screening being good in the first place.

So I had two options. Keep handing out research runs and cut corners on the research itself, or protect the depth and be honest that unlimited free AI has a limit.

I picked the second one.

What each plan actually gets

Pro is also $189 a year, which works out to ten months for twelve.

Who each plan is for

Free is for the person with a question. You heard about a coin, you want to know whether you can hold it, and you want to see the reasoning rather than a one-word label. That's the whole screening database, free, forever. If that's your use case, you never need to pay us anything, and I'd rather you didn't.

Plus is for the person with a portfolio. You hold somewhere between five and fifteen things. You want to know not just whether they're permissible but whether they're any good, and roughly where they sit in their own cycle before you add to a position. Fifty coins of fundamental analysis and ten on the Supply and Demand Index covers that comfortably, and three portfolios is enough to keep long-term holdings separate from whatever you're testing.

The ten work like this: you pick them, one at a time, and taking one off your list doesn't hand the slot back. That's deliberate. Ten coins you chose and stayed with is a portfolio you're actually tracking. Ten swapped out every other day is the whole database on a $9 plan, and then the plan can't pay for the data behind it. Pick the ones you hold. If you want to move through coins freely, that's Pro.

Pro is for the person doing real research. You're screening things nobody has screened yet, you track more than a dozen assets, and you want the timeframe controls rather than one fixed window. Twenty research runs a month is roughly one every working day and a half.

If you're between Plus and Pro, take Plus. You can move up in a click and I'd rather you underspent.

The part I'm still not sure about

We just added shorter windows to the Supply and Demand Index: four hours, thirty days, ninety days, alongside the one-year reading it has always used. I built the four-hour view against my own advice, because I wanted to find out whether it holds up.

Here's what it looks like right now, on Bitcoin:

4H: 80. 30D: 74. 90D: 66. 1Y: 49.

Same coin. Same moment. On a thirty-day view the price is sitting at the very top of its range and the reading is deep supply. On a one-year view it's a fifth of the way up and reads neutral. Thirty-one points apart, and which one is "right" depends entirely on where you decide the window ends.

I think that's the most useful thing on the panel, and it isn't the score. It's the disagreement. Short windows move fast, reverse often, and will tell you a coin is overheated the week before it doubles. If the four-hour reading turns out to be noise, the tool will show you that it's noise, which is a better argument against short-term trading than an article telling you not to do it.

That's the honest position. The one-year reading is the one the index is built around, and it's the one on every card and every report. The rest are there so you can see how much the answer moves when you move the goalposts.

One more thing about the pricing

The plans stay the same price everywhere in the world. Our courses are priced regionally, because a course is a file and selling it in Karachi costs us nothing extra. A research run costs $0.3058 whether you're in London or Lahore, so a regional discount on AI would mean selling below cost. Affordability is handled with a cheaper tier instead of a cheaper region.

And here's the part that decides why the plans are priced low rather than high. Every coin somebody researches gets added to our database, and that database is free for everyone. When you run a screening on something nobody has looked at yet, you aren't only answering your own question. You're adding a verdict that every Muslim can read without paying us anything.

That's the trade. The research on demand costs money. The ruling never will.