Free to build. Free to download.

The trick this category plays

The standard pattern is simple enough to describe in a sentence: the builder is free, the preview is free, and the PDF costs money. You find out after you have typed your whole history in, at the exact moment you were about to apply for something. Some charge a “one-time” fee that turns out to enrol you in a subscription that renews every four weeks.

We think that is indefensible when the person on the other end is, more often than not, already spending down savings to get through the search. So the export is free, the watermark does not exist, and the limits are written below rather than discovered.

What you get for free, in practice

Tell us the job you are going for and we match it against 1,026 real occupations, then guide every field with the vocabulary and example lines that fit that job. You are never handed an empty box and told to write about yourself. When the resume is done, the Readiness Score grades six things it can actually measure and names the specific line that would earn each missing point.

The free tier includes 1 cover letter and 1 mock interview as well, with no card and no clock, so you can see what the AI actually writes before deciding whether any of it is worth paying for.

Is a free resume builder good enough?

For the resume itself, yes, and you should be suspicious of anyone who tells you otherwise. A strong resume is a structural problem, the right things in the right order, quantified, in a layout that parses. None of that requires a subscription. What genuinely takes work is aiming it at a specific posting, again and again, which is the part we charge for.

If you would rather do that part by hand, our guide to tailoring an application walks the whole loop and needs no account at all.

What building one actually looks like

You start by naming the job you are going for. That single answer does most of the work: it is matched against 1,026 real occupations from O*NET 29.1, the US Department of Labor’s occupational database, and from there every field knows what it is asking about. The skills step offers the vocabulary that occupation actually uses. The experience step offers example lines built from that role’s own documented work activities, not a generic template shared across an entire industry.

Each example line ends in a bracketed prompt, a question asking you for the number that belongs there. That is deliberate and it is the one thing we will not compromise on: the product never fills in a figure on your behalf. A resume with an invented metric is worse than a vague one, because the invention surfaces in an interview when someone asks about it.

When the draft exists, the Readiness Score grades it on things that can be measured: structure, completeness, quantified outcomes, writing quality. It tells you the specific line that would earn each missing point. It is deterministic, so the same resume always scores the same. It is not an AI opinion presented as a number.

Where the free tier genuinely stops

Worth being blunt, because the point of this page is that you should not have to find out later. Exporting is limited on the free tier, and so are cover letters and mock interviews, at 1 and 1 respectively. None of those refill: they are yours once, for the life of the account, and we say so here rather than at the button. Orion’s coaching runs on an allowance rather than being unlimited.

If you are sending one application, none of that will affect you. If you are running a real search, dozens of postings over a couple of months, the counting is exactly what a plan removes, and that is the honest reason to buy one. Not hidden features. There are none; every paid plan is identical and nothing is held back for a higher tier.

The full breakdown of what each plan costs is on the pricing page, and the ATS checker explains what the score can and cannot tell you before you rely on it.