Sudowrite's free trial needs no credit card, but Sudowrite doesn't publish how many credits it includes: four review sites put it at about 10,000, and Sudowrite's own help centre describes the trial as a seven-day refund. At the rates Sudowrite itself publishes, 10,000 credits is roughly 830 words from its Muse model, or about 20,000 from a budget model. After the trial, plans run from $10 to $59 a month, and on the two cheaper plans unused credits expire at every monthly refresh.
Every Sudowrite figure below was read on its own pricing page (page dated 6 November 2026), its help centre and its blog post on what a novel costs (last updated 19 October 2026), all checked 12 November 2026. The word counts are our arithmetic on those numbers.
What the Sudowrite free trial includes
| Question | What Sudowrite's own pages say | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Is there a free trial? | Yes: every plan has "Start Free Trial", marked "No credit card, cancel anytime" | Pricing |
| How many credits? | Not published anywhere we could find | Pricing, help centre |
| How long? | Not published. The help article "Is there a trial?" describes a refund instead: tell Sudowrite "within the first 7 days" and "we'll not only cancel your plan but also refund you" | Help centre, 17 Feb 2026 |
| Free use after it? | No. "Using any of Sudowrite's AI features requires an active Sudowrite plan" | Which plan should I get? |
| What happens to your writing? | You can still open and export documents without a plan | Pause or cancel |
The pricing page starts the trial from any of the three plans' buttons and doesn't say whether the plan you click changes what you get, or what happens when it runs out.
How many credits is the trial? Who says what
| Page | Trial size it gives | Length | Checked |
|---|---|---|---|
| UC Strategies | 10,000 credits, "approximately 2,000 words of generation or 5-10 Rewrites" | Not given | Updated 26 Jun 2026 |
| Toolworthy | 10,000 credits | "No time limit" | Updated 15 Aug 2026 |
| Daily AI Fixs | "Roughly 10,000 credits", one time | Not given | 29 Jul 2026 |
| CostBench | "Approximately 10,000 credits" | "Not published" | 31 Oct 2026 |
| Inkfluence AI | "Not published" | Points to the 7-day refund | 24 Oct 2026 |
Four pages agree on about 10,000 credits; none links a Sudowrite page that says so. UC Strategies' "2,000 words" fits the cheap end of Sudowrite's mid tier (5,000 credits per 1,000 words); at the Muse figure Sudowrite's own blog uses, it's less than half that.
How many words 10,000 credits buy
Sudowrite says plainly that "there's no 1:1 relationship between the words you generate and the number of credits used" (What are credits?): the cost depends on the model, the feature and how much of your story the model reads first. Its help centre gives one test: the same 200 words of continuation cost about 70 credits on GPT-5 Nano and over 8,000 on Claude 4.1 Opus (How many credits do features use?).
Its blog goes further and gives credits per 1,000 words for each tier of model. We divided the trial by them:
| Model (Sudowrite's tiers) | Credits per 1,000 words, Sudowrite's figure | Words from a 10,000-credit trial |
|---|---|---|
| Budget: DeepSeek V3, GPT-4o Mini | about 500 (range 350–1,000) | about 20,000 (10,000–28,600) |
| Mid: Claude 3.7 Sonnet | about 6,000 | about 1,700 |
| Mid: Muse 1.5, Sudowrite's fiction model | about 12,000 (tier range 5,000–15,000) | about 830 (670–2,000) |
| Premium: Claude Opus | about 30,000 (20,000–40,000+) | about 330 (250–500) |
Source: Sudowrite's rates, read 12 November 2026; the division is ours. The model you're there to try, Muse, gets you about one scene. Every rewrite of a paragraph you didn't like comes out of the same 10,000, and a filled-in Story Bible makes each call read more before it writes. Sudowrite's own example: "filling up your Story Bible and then asking Sudowrite to generate your full chapter's prose could consume quite a few credits."
Sudowrite pricing after the trial
| Plan | Billed monthly | Billed yearly | Credits a month | Unused credits |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hobby & Student | $19 | $10 a month | 225,000 | Expire at each refresh |
| Professional | $29 | $22 a month | 1,000,000 (the visible card also shows 450,000) | Expire at each refresh |
| Max | $59 | $44 a month | 2,000,000 | Roll over for up to 12 months |
Prices and credits from the help centre's plan list and the pricing page's own structured data; the visible Professional card shows both 1,000,000 and 450,000. Expiry from Do credits roll over?. Professional and Max add developmental edits, line edits and beta reads.
What a month of each plan writes, in words
The same division, for a month of credits. It assumes you spend every credit before the refresh, which on two of the three plans is the only way not to lose them.
| Plan | Muse words a month (12,000 per 1,000) | Opus words a month (30,000 per 1,000) | Per 1,000 Muse words, billed monthly | Billed yearly |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hobby & Student | about 18,750 | about 7,500 | $1.01 | $0.53 |
| Professional | about 83,300 | about 33,300 | $0.35 | $0.26 |
| Max | about 166,700 | about 66,700 | $0.35 | $0.26 |
Our arithmetic on Sudowrite's prices and its blog's rates, 12 November 2026. If Professional turns out to be 450,000 credits, a month is about 37,500 Muse words, $0.77 per 1,000 billed monthly or $0.59 yearly. Sudowrite's own blog reaches the same place for a whole book: an 80,000-word Muse draft takes about 960,000 credits, "~4-5 months" of Hobby & Student at $40–95, or one month of Professional.
Can you use Sudowrite for free?
Only through the trial. There's no plan that stays free, the trial isn't described as renewable, and when it runs out every AI feature needs a subscription. Extra credits can be bought once you're out, but only with an active plan; those bought credits never expire, yet you still need a plan to spend them. Quick Edit and Chat don't use credits by default, so a Hobby & Student writer who mostly chats will barely touch the allowance.
Can you write spicy scenes on the Sudowrite trial?
Sudowrite markets Muse as writing "anything – no filters", but neither the pricing page nor the help centre says which models the trial can use, so check the model menu before you spend credits on a scene. In KudoWrite there's no content filter of KudoWrite's own: romance, dark and explicit themes are your call within the law, and the model's own behaviour still applies.
How to cancel a Sudowrite subscription
Settings (the gear icon) → Manage Membership. A monthly plan can be paused for up to three months, and the pause has a second confirmation page that Sudowrite's own article says is "easy to miss". A yearly plan can only be cancelled. Your documents stay readable and exportable either way (Pause or cancel, updated 7 January 2026).
Where Sudowrite's trial and plans fall short
Muse is trained for fiction, and Sudowrite's Muse page says it "will write anything – no filters". The limits are in how you pay for it:
- The trial is unmeasured. No published credit count or length, and at Muse's rate the reported 10,000 credits is one scene, far short of the point where a long story starts to drift.
- Two of three plans burn what you don't use. Hobby & Student and Professional credits expire at every refresh. A month the day job wins is a month paid for nothing.
- Monthly billing costs nearly double. $19 against $10 for the same Hobby & Student credits; the cheap figure on the pricing page is a year paid up front ($120).
- No plan, no AI. Top-up credits sit unusable the moment the subscription stops.
- A fuller Story Bible costs more per call. In Sudowrite's own words, filling it up and generating chapter prose "could consume quite a few credits", so the feature that keeps a long book straight is the one that drains the allowance fastest.
KudoWrite: no allowance to use up
On Sudowrite you learn what a month of credits was worth after it has refreshed. In KudoWrite there's no month: no subscription, and nothing expires the credits you buy, so a quiet month costs nothing and the pack is still there when you come back.
You get one free credit on sign-up, once your email is confirmed, and you spend it on your own pages. After that, one-off packs: $3.50 for 100 credits (about a short novel), $7.50 for 500 (about a full book), $12.50 for 1,000.
| KudoWrite | Sudowrite | |
|---|---|---|
| To try it | 1 free credit, on your own book | A trial of unpublished size; reviewers say about 10,000 credits |
| After that | One-off packs from $3.50; no subscription | $10–$44 a month yearly, $19–$59 monthly |
| Unused credits | A balance that never expires | Expire monthly on Hobby & Student and Professional |
| Story bible | Keeps up by itself from what you write; you can still edit any entry | A Story Bible you fill up, each call reading more of it |
| Content | No filter of KudoWrite's own; the model's own behaviour still applies | Muse marketed as "no filters" |
| Moving a book | Imports .docx, .odt, .epub, Scrivener zips and Sudowrite's Story Bible CSVs | Imports .docx, .doc, .rtf, .odt, .txt and Scrivener backups |
The story bible costs nothing extra to keep. KudoWrite's bible (characters, places, items, events) and a summary of the whole book update from your prose a couple of minutes after you stop typing; you read them in the sidebar and fix an entry when it's wrong, and an entry you wrote is never rewritten by the AI.
The next step
If you want to feel Muse's prose, take Sudowrite's trial and spend it on one scene you care about. If you're deciding where to write a book, test on the book: export your Sudowrite draft and its Story Bible CSVs, import both in KudoWrite (My Books → Import), and write the next chapter with the free credit. For the full head-to-head, read the Sudowrite alternative with no subscription and Sudowrite vs Novelcrafter; for another trial measured the same way, NovelAI's free trial in words.