Grandfathering Policy
Sortia for Google Sheets ยท last updated August 23, 2026
The short version
Two changes have moved capabilities out of the free plan. On 10 August 2026: decision trees, Schedule Risk and Critical Chain. On 21 August 2026 the whole Project Planning tab became Pro, which took Earned Value and the S-Curve forecast with it.
If you were using Sortia before 13 August 2026, you keep all of it, free, permanently.
Running any of it costs you nothing from your five free Pro runs. Everything else that was free is still free, and still unmetered.
This page also sets out the part that is uncomfortable: the way Sortia recognizes an existing user is good, not perfect, and this page says exactly where it fails and what to do if it fails for you. If Sortia is treating you as new and you were not, skip to the fix.
What moved on 10 August 2026
Sortia has five Pro engines. Two of them were always Pro. Three of them used to be free, with size limits on how big a model you could build:
| Capability | Before 10 August 2026 | After |
|---|---|---|
| Monte Carlo risk simulation | Pro | Pro |
| Optimization under uncertainty | Pro | Pro |
| Decision trees | Free, size limited | Pro, no size limit |
| Schedule Risk (Monte Carlo CPM) | Free, size limited | Pro, no size limit |
| Critical Chain | Free, size limited | Pro, no size limit |
The same change deleted every size cap in the product, for everybody, on both plans. The old free plan let you use those three engines only on small models. If you are grandfathered, you now get them without the limits you used to have.
What moved on 21 August 2026
The Project Planning tab used to hold four tools and gate two of them. It now holds seven and gates all seven: the tab is Pro as a whole. Three of those tools were new that day, so they were never free. Two of them were free before, and are inside the gate now:
- Earned Value, with its task roll-up and its SPI, CPI, EAC and TCPI tables.
- The S-Curve completion forecast.
The Decisions tab was consolidated the same day and gates as one engine too, but nothing on it moved: the three tools that joined decision trees there were new, and had never been free.
If your stamp is earlier than 13 August 2026, this change does not reach you. Grandfathering is written against an engine rather than against a tool name, so the same grant that keeps Schedule Risk free for you now covers the tab it lives on. You keep Earned Value and the S-Curve, free and unmetered, and running them still costs you nothing from your five free Pro runs.
If you started using Sortia between 13 and 21 August 2026, those two tools were free for you and the stamp cannot prove it. That case is real, we know about it, and it is a fix by hand.
What did not move
All of this stayed on the free plan, for every user, old or new, with the same engine ceilings on Pro as on free:
- Every tool in Data Analysis, all 38: statistics, tests, forecasting, machine learning, matching.
- Optimization, with all three of its engines: linear, nonlinear and evolutionary.
- What-If Analysis: scenarios, Goal Seek and Data Tables.
- Every template in the gallery loads on every plan.
The two changes above are the whole list of what has ever moved out of the free plan. Nothing else has been withdrawn from anyone.
Everyone gets five full-quality Pro runs
Whether you are grandfathered or brand new, the free plan includes five complete runs of any Pro engine before the wall. Full quality: every distribution, correlated inputs, full trial depth, no crippled sample. A run is only counted once it has produced a report, so a run you cancel or one that errors costs you nothing.
If you are grandfathered, running anything on the Decisions tab or the Project Planning tab does not spend those five. Decision trees, Schedule Risk, Critical Chain, Earned Value and the S-Curve are all free for you, so charging a run for them would be the same claw-back by another name. Your five stay available for Monte Carlo risk simulation and optimization under uncertainty.
What grandfathering does not cover
It covers those three engines, and whatever those three engines have since grown to hold, and nothing else. It does not include the two engines that were always Pro, and it does not remove the “Made with Sortia” attribution mark that the free plan writes once at the foot of a generated report sheet and adds to chart titles. Removing that mark is part of what a Pro license buys.
How Sortia decides that you were here first
You should know how the mechanism works, because it explains both what it gets right and where it misses.
The first time Sortia reads your plan, it writes down the date. That stamp is stored against your Google account rather than against one file, so it follows you into every spreadsheet you open Sortia in. If the stamp is earlier than 13 August 2026, you keep the Decisions tab and the Project Planning tab, decision trees, Schedule Risk, Critical Chain, Earned Value and the S-Curve included, free and unmetered, for as long as you keep using Sortia.
The stamp records the first time Sortia ran the code that writes it, not the day you installed the add-on. Existing installs were pinned by the Marketplace to an older build until 11 August 2026, so the earliest stamp that can exist by the clock is that day. The boundary sits at 13 August 2026 to cover the two days in which the update actually reached the installed base, which is why it is later than the “installed before 10 August 2026” wording on our pricing page. The check is deliberately looser than that sentence, never tighter. Being generous in this direction cannot break the promise.
Sortia also looks for settings that only an earlier session could have left behind, such as an activated license record or a lifetime count of Pro engine runs. When it finds one, it backdates your stamp to 9 August 2026 and grandfathers you, even though this is the first time the stamping code has run for you.
Where this misses
The detection is not perfect and we are not going to pretend it is. From inside the add-on, these cases are indistinguishable from a brand-new install:
- You installed Sortia a while ago and are only now opening it. If your first run of the current build happens on or after 13 August 2026, you get stamped with that date and the check does not recognize you. This is the big one.
- You used the free plan in the old days and left no trace. The build that ran before the change wrote its stored settings only on paths a free user never took, so a free user from that era can leave nothing behind for the backdating to find.
- You are signed in with a different Google account than the one you originally used Sortia with, or your add-on settings for Sortia were cleared.
- You started between 13 and 21 August 2026 and used Earned Value or the S-Curve. Those two were free in that window, and the boundary that protects everyone else was set before the window opened. The rule at the foot of this page still applies to you; the code just cannot see it.
If that is you, we will fix it by hand
Email support@sortia.io, tell us roughly when you started using Sortia and which Google account you use it with, and we will sort it out for you directly. The commitment on this page is about what you were using, not about what a timestamp happened to record. We would rather trust you than let a fair claim fail on a date the code could not see.
The rule this comes from
Freemium is a ratchet here. When we tighten the line between free and Pro, the tightening applies to people arriving afterwards, and we do not reach back and take a working tool away from someone who already depends on it. That is the rule we wrote down before this change shipped, and it is the reason the recognition code shipped ahead of the change it protects.
If a future change moves something else behind the line, the same rule applies, and it will be published here before it ships.
Contact
Questions about this policy, or about what your account currently has: email support@sortia.io. See also Pricing, the Terms of Service and Support.