What your plan actually includes - and why a lifetime licence still says "Upgrade to schedule"

Modified on Tue, 4 Aug at 6:33 PM

You bought Booked Solid OS outright, the app confirms it, and now a button is asking you for money. The message people send us is usually some version of I'm being prompted to pay $100 despite a lifetime licence, and the screen behind it looks like this: Autopilot and the daily Plays now show "Upgrade to schedule" for $100. If your first reaction was why am I being asked to pay when I own it, that is a fair question and it deserves a real answer. Your lifetime licence is real and permanent, nothing you already had is being taken back, and there is a specific list of things that sit on the paid Otto tier. This page names every one of them, so you do not meet them one at a time on your own screen.

The short answer

Buying outright gets you the interactive app for life. You ask Otto for something and Otto does it, on your command, for as long as you own the app. No subscription, no renewal, nothing to re-buy, and no usage bill from us.

What buying outright does not settle on its own is your tier. How you paid and what the app unlocks are two separate values on your licence record, and lifetime accounts do not all carry the same tier. If a card in your app reads Upgrade to schedule, your record is currently carrying the interactive tier, the one the app calls Pearl.

The headline capability on the Otto tier is unattended scheduling: the app running your Plays on a timetable, on its own initiative, with nobody sitting there. It is not the only thing there. A handful of individual tools are on the Otto tier too, even though you start them by hand. An earlier version of this page told you unattended scheduling was the single boundary. That was wrong, and correcting it is the reason this page was rewritten, so the full list is below rather than left for you to trip over.

So if the message you were about to send was Please confirm my lifetime licence covers the scheduled/autopilot tier and remove the upgrade prompt, here is the straight version. While your record carries the interactive tier, it does not cover unattended scheduling, and the prompt is not the app misreading your purchase. If you believe the record itself is wrong, do not pay to make the message go away: there is a section below on getting it read by hand.

"my account is marked lifetime" and your tier are two different things

This is where most of the confusion starts. Your account carries two separate facts, and they answer two different questions.

Your plan is lifetime or monthly. That is how you paid. It is what the Your account box in Settings > General reports when it reads Signed in as yourname, lifetime license.
Your tier is what the app unlocks: the Otto tier, or the interactive one. It is not shown in that box at all. The app reads it from your licence record every time it checks your account.

So "my account is marked lifetime" can be completely true and still tell you nothing about whether unattended scheduling is switched on. A lifetime plan on the interactive tier is a normal, permanent, fully paid-up state. It is not an expiry and it is not a downgrade of something you bought.

What you keep at no further cost

All of this is yours, permanently, whatever tier your record carries:

The chat with Otto. It thinks on your own Claude plan, so there is never a separate usage bill from us.
The Plays tab: the catalogue you run yourself, and the Get set up recipes with their Do it for me buttons, apart from the ones named in the next section.
Fill the Room, the Play that goes and finds buyers for you. This one is not gated and stays available.
Today, Gig Desk, Calendar, Tasks and Inbox.
Dashboard, Connections, Brain and Studio, under More.
On the Brain tab, the Brain health check itself. Run check now runs on your own machine and costs nothing.
EPIN membership, including pressing Send now on your weekly postcard yourself.

What sits on the Otto tier

Here is the full list, including the ones you start by hand. We would rather you read it here than discover it mid-task.

Unattended Autopilot runs: Otto working through jobs on his own while you are elsewhere. In the sidebar, under Automations, pressing Turn on beside Autopilot opens an upgrade panel instead of starting it.
Autonomous booking: the standing run that works your booking cycle end to end. The app calls it Fully Autonomous Booking when it asks you to confirm, and it is gated on exactly the same line as Autopilot.
Set up the Autopilot schedule: the Get set up recipe in the Plays tab that puts the morning sweep, the silence patrol and the weekly runs on a timetable.
Run Library Radar and Run School Radar: the two county scanners in the same list of recipes. You start these yourself, and they are still on the Otto tier. Their cards read Upgrade to schedule exactly like the Autopilot schedule card does. The DJ and AV edition does not show Library Radar at all.
Milestone Radar: scan for anniversaries, retreats and appreciation events: the Play that scouts dated occasions. Start it without the Otto tier and the app answers with this, word for word: Milestone Radar is part of the Otto tier. On Pearl you can find buyers with Fill the Room any time; to have Otto scout dated occasions for you, upgrade at https://booked.kivimedia.co/upgrade
Clean these up on Brain health: you can always see what needs a look, and having it fixed for you is the Otto part. The app says so directly: Cleaning up the brain runs on Otto. On Pearl you can see what needs a look any time; to have it fixed for you, upgrade to Otto at https://booked.kivimedia.co/upgrade
The Booth: approving Otto's work from your phone through Telegram. The Booth card in Settings > General says it plainly: running Otto on a schedule and approving it from your phone is part of the Otto tier.
The automatic weekly EPIN send: the postcard going out on its own every week. Pressing Send now yourself is not gated.

Two of those, Library Radar and School Radar, are the ones that surprise people most, because you press the button yourself and nothing about them runs overnight. They are on the Otto tier anyway. That is the correction this page exists to make.

Why Autopilot ran for a month and then stopped

This is the part that stings, and it gets a straight answer here rather than a tidy one. People write in saying autopilot has been running and generating my daily briefings for the past month, and then the upgrade prompt appeared out of nowhere. Nothing was revoked and no rule was changed on you.

The app did not yet know which tier your licence carried, and while that was unknown it treated the tier as if it were the full one. When the app began reading the authoritative, server-signed tier value for your account, the gate started applying properly. Said plainly: the behaviour you saw, Autopilot running, was the bug. The prompt you see now is the app working as designed. That is an unsatisfying thing to hear when the practical effect is that something you were using has stopped, and we are not going to dress it up.

The dead end: reinstalling and reactivating will not bring it back

Almost everyone tries this first. Signing out and back in, re-entering your licence, reinstalling the app, moving it to another machine: none of it restores the schedule, and none of it can. Every one of those makes the app re-check your account with the licensing server, and that check is the exact step that reads your tier and applies the gate. You land in the same place an hour later. Skip it.

Nothing is at risk if you try it anyway. Your work, your Booking HQ, your Brain and your settings are files on your own machine and a re-check does not touch them. It will not change the prompt and it will not damage anything either.

Where the prompt appears

Three different labels for the same line. Each one opens the same page at booked.kivimedia.co/upgrade.

In the Plays tab, a gated Get set up recipe shows Upgrade to schedule where the others show Do it for me. Those are Set up the Autopilot schedule, Run Library Radar and Run School Radar.
Pressing Turn on beside Autopilot in the sidebar opens a panel headed Autopilot is an upgrade with an Upgrade to Autopilot button.
In Settings > General, the Booth card shows Upgrade to Otto.

Seeing all three does not mean three separate things were taken from you. It is one tier line showing up in the three places that cross it. The Autopilot is an upgrade panel also states that your existing payment is credited toward the upgrade, which is worth reading before you assume you would be paying twice.

How to tell which tier you are on

Look at the top bar. A coral Otto badge beside the Booked Solid wordmark means your record carries the Otto tier. No badge means it does not.
Open the Plays tab and look at Set up the Autopilot schedule. If it reads Upgrade to schedule, unattended scheduling is not on your account.

The Your account box in Settings > General answers the other question. It tells you lifetime or monthly, which is your plan and not your tier, so it will never settle this one either way.

What both tiers run on

Both tiers do their thinking on your own Claude account, paid to Anthropic and not to us. Claude Pro, about $20 a month, covers most performers. If you run Autopilot hard every day you may need Claude Max, about $100 a month. You sign in once during setup. We never add a usage bill on top: a heavy week simply draws on your own Claude plan. A job that reaches your Claude plan's usage limit pauses and says so, and you run it again once the limit resets.

If you believe your account carries the wrong tier

This is a genuine possibility and we are not going to pretend otherwise. Lifetime accounts do not all carry the same tier, and licence records written during a migration are exactly the kind that can end up not matching what you bought. If your purchase history says you should be on Otto, open a ticket and ask us to check your record by hand. Include the email address you bought with, roughly when you bought, and what you had working before it stopped. We read the actual record rather than guessing, and where the label is our error we correct it. That is a correction, not a purchase.

If you are also wondering what the move to Kivi Media changed about your purchase, the article in this folder about buying before the Kivi Media move covers that, and it draws the same tier line this page does.

If unattended scheduling is the piece you actually want

Then talk to us before you pay for it. We would rather work out with you whether the Otto tier fits how you work than have you buy it blind and find out afterwards. Every Upgrade to schedule, Upgrade to Autopilot and Upgrade to Otto button in the app opens the same page at booked.kivimedia.co/upgrade, and the article in this folder on upgrading from Pearl to Otto walks through the checkout end to end. Neither is going anywhere if you ask your questions first.

If it still does not add up

If a screen is asking you to pay and you believe you already own that part of the app, do not pay it just to make the message go away. Submit a ticket from this help center, tell us the email address you bought with and what the screen says, and we will read your actual record and tell you exactly what it carries.