What Changed on 21 August, and What Stays Free

One thing changed on ShariaQuant, and one thing did not change at all. The one that did not change is the important one, so let me put it first.

Every Shariah verdict on ShariaQuant stays free. In full. Permanently. Every screened cryptocurrency, the ones we rate Halal and the ones we rate Haram, every tokenized stock, the airdrop and presale screenings, the reasoning behind each verdict, 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 thing that changed.

One date, not two

It all happened on 21 August 2026. I had planned to split it across a fortnight, ending the free credit offer first and moving the tools later. Splitting it just meant two rounds of confusion instead of one, so I did it in a single day.

Two things moved that day.

The first is the free AI research allowance. Five research runs a month became one run when you create the account, and that was the whole grant for a new account.

Update, 1 September 2026. That one run is now zero, and the old five-a-month stopped refreshing for the accounts that still had it.

When I first published this, the paragraph above continued: "If you already had an account before that day, you keep your monthly allowance. Nothing was taken from anyone who already had it. That is not a soft promise, it is how the code decides." Eleven days later I ended it. I am quoting what I wrote rather than deleting it, because a promise revised in silence is worse than one you admit you broke.

Why: the free allowance was a recurring cost with no ceiling and no revenue behind it, and the AI got more expensive per run rather than less. I could keep the promise or keep the depth of the screening, and I chose the screening.

What did not happen: nothing already granted was taken back. Credits people had and had not spent stayed spendable. What stopped was the monthly refill. AI research is now a paid feature outright, and the Shariah verdicts, the part that matters, are still free for everyone, permanently.

And one thing I did do about it. Everyone who signed up while the old offer was still on the page, and who ended up with nothing when it was withdrawn, has been given a research credit by hand. It does not undo the change and I am not pretending it does. You joined on the strength of something I then took off the table, and a credit is the least I can do about that.

The second is that three tools that used to be open to everyone moved onto plans: fundamental analysis, the Quant Score, and the Supply and Demand Index beyond Bitcoin.

Free does not lose all three. 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 too. 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.

A deep AI research run costs us somewhere around 35 to 40 cents in compute. That's one asset, screened properly: property status, the three prohibitions, revenue purity, debt thresholds, the fundamentals section, the lot. Five free runs a month, across the accounts that had them, was roughly a thousand dollars a year spent on accounts with no revenue behind them and no ceiling as more people join.

I'm giving a range rather than the single figure this article used to quote, because the honest answer is that it moves. The model behind the screening has been upgraded twice this year and each version thinks harder and costs more per run than the last. A number I measured in August was already out of date by September.

The uncomfortable part is that it gets worse precisely when things go well. A thousand free accounts on that allowance is over $20,000 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 recently 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 AI plans stay the same price everywhere in the world. Our courses are priced by country, in three bands set against national income. Foundations runs $49, $24 or $14 a month depending on where you are, and Premium $99, $49 or $29. A course is a file, and selling it in Karachi costs us nothing extra, so there is no reason for a student in Lahore to pay a London price.

AI is different. A research run costs the same 35 to 40 cents whichever country it is run from, so a regional discount on AI would mean selling below cost. Affordability there 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 verdict never will.