By now you read "free" like a contract — eyes already scanning for the string attached.
It's a fair instinct. Online, "free" almost always means free with conditions, and the conditions come in a handful of recognisable shapes. So before you trust any site that says you can practise typing for free, it's worth knowing the shapes — and then seeing the one kind of free that doesn't fit any of them.
There's nearly always a string
The reason the word feels untrustworthy is that it usually isattached to something — a clock, a cap, a locked door, a future invoice. None of those are free in the way the word promises. They're "free" as a marketing posture, with the real terms in the small print. Here's a field guide.
A field guide to "free"
You've met all four. The trial that needed a card "just to verify." The free plan that turned out to be a demo for the paid one. The tool that let you do three things a day. The app that was free until the version that wasn't. Each is free with an asterisk, and the asterisk is the whole story.
The fifth kind: no string
There's one more kind, rarer than it should be: free with nothing after it. No clock, no cap, no locked tier, no card, and no paywall waiting in a future release. That's where TypeLords sits — practise as much as you like, for as long as you like, with every activity and every level open to everyone.
It can be that way because it isn't a funnel toward a paid plan — there is no paid plan to funnel you to. The whole thing runs on TL Coins you earn by typing, never with money, so there's no invoice anywhere in the design to defer to later. The thing it wants from you is that you keep practising, not that you eventually pay.