Mentimeter Free Plan Limits Explained — and When to Pay Per Event
The Mentimeter free plan hands you unlimited presentations, unlimited question slides and almost every slide type — and then stops you at one number that catches people out: **50 participants per month, counted cumulatively across every session, not per presentation**. So a single all-hands or a mid-sized workshop can use up your whole month in one go. This article lays out exactly what the free plan includes, how that participant cap is actually counted (including the 8-hour grace period most reviews miss), what is locked behind a paid plan, what upgrading costs, and the third option the "free vs subscription" framing quietly leaves out — pay-per-use — for anyone who runs events occasionally rather than every week.
- The hard limit is 50 participants per month, cumulative across all your sessions, resetting on your monthly sign-up date — not a per-presentation cap
- You cannot export or save results after a session ends on the free plan; screenshot during the session or lose the data, and a "Powered by Mentimeter" badge stays on screen
- The entry paid tier removes the participant cap and unlocks export; third-party breakdowns put it around $11.99–$14.99 per presenter/month billed annually
- If you run one or two events a year, an annual subscription is mostly idle months — a flat pay-per-use tool like ZENIN CLOUD ($70 for 7 days, $10/day) is the option this comparison usually skips
Mentimeter free plan at a glance
What the Mentimeter free plan actually includes
Start with the good news, because most "free plan limits" posts skip it. The free (Basic) plan lets you build as many presentations as you like, with unlimited question slides, quiz slides and content slides, and access to almost every question type Mentimeter offers (Mentimeter Help Center). For building and rehearsing, the free plan is barely constrained.
- Unlimited presentations — no cap on how many Mentis you create
- Unlimited question, quiz and content slides within a presentation
- Almost all question types — polls, open-ended, word clouds, scales, ranking, Q&A (the Quick Form slide type is reserved for Pro)
- Up to 200 slides per presentation, a performance ceiling rather than a paywall
In other words, the free plan is not crippled on content. It is designed to let you build and test the full toolkit. The limits that actually bite are about who sees your session live and what you keep afterwards — and those are worth understanding in detail before you rely on it for a real event.
The 50-participant monthly cap — and how it really counts
The one number that decides whether the free plan works for you is the participant limit: 50 participants per month. The detail that trips people up is that this is *cumulative across every session you run in the month*, not a limit per presentation. Two 30-person workshops in the same month already blow past it (Wooclap).
The counter resets every month on the day you signed up — not on the first of the calendar month — so if you registered on the 20th, your allowance refills on the 20th. A unique participant is counted once from the moment you click "present", and someone who leaves and rejoins the same session within a short window is not double-counted.
Mentimeter never kicks participants out of a live presentation, and it gives you roughly an 8-hour grace period to finish a session even after you cross the 50-participant line. In practice that means you can run one single presentation per 30 days with more than 50 people — but you cannot start another live session until the counter resets.
That workaround is genuinely useful for a one-off with a bigger room, but it is fragile: it only covers a single continuous session, it locks you out of any further live sessions that month, and it is not something to plan a recurring program around. For any real cadence of events, the 50-per-month ceiling is the reason people upgrade.
What's locked behind a paid plan
Beyond the participant cap, three restrictions catch people out on the free plan — and the first one loses data if you do not know about it in advance.
You cannot export or save results
On the free plan, results are shown live on screen, but you cannot export them to Excel, and they are not saved after the session ends — the guidance from institutions using Mentimeter is blunt: screenshot during the session or lose the data (UAL Digital Learning Support). Excel and PDF export only unlock on paid plans. If a post-event report is a deliverable — a summary of what the room said — the free plan will not produce one.
The "Powered by Mentimeter" badge
Free presentations display a "Powered by Mentimeter" badge to participants. For an internal team retro nobody cares; for a client-facing workshop or a conference where the room is branded, it reads as unpolished. Removing it is a paid feature.
A few slide and feature gates
The Quick Form slide type is Pro-only, and some advanced collaboration and branding controls sit on higher tiers. None of these are dealbreakers for a simple poll or word cloud — the export and participant limits decide far more upgrades than these do.
What upgrading actually costs
Mentimeter is priced per presenter and billed annually — there is no true pay-as-you-go option, so a price shown "per month" is a twelve-month commitment displayed in its smallest unit. Third-party pricing breakdowns put the entry paid tier at roughly $11.99–$14.99 per presenter/month billed annually, with monthly billing (where offered) higher again (Vendr, Wooclap).
The key phrase is *per presenter*. Costs are per seat, so a department with several trainers multiplies the annual figure by headcount — and every seat is billed for twelve months whether it runs one event or fifty.
When the free plan is enough — and when it is not
The honest answer is that the free plan is excellent for one thing and unreliable for another. Match it to your actual use before you build a session on it.
You are evaluating the tool, running a classroom-sized session (under 50 people) once in a given month, and you do not need to keep the results afterwards. As a trial, it is one of the most complete free tiers around.
Your audience is larger than 50, you run more than one session a month, you need an export or a saved record, or a vendor badge on the screen is a problem. Any one of these forces a decision.
The awkward case is the occasional larger event — a couple of all-hands or workshops a year, each with 80–200 people. Free will not cover them, but an annual per-presenter subscription means paying for ten idle months to use two.
That middle case is where the "free vs paid" framing quietly fails, because it only offers two answers — both of which assume you either present rarely and tiny, or often enough to justify a yearly seat.
The option the free-vs-paid choice hides: pay-per-event
There is a third billing model that neither the free plan nor an annual subscription represents: pay only for the days you actually run an event. For someone who hits Mentimeter's participant cap a handful of times a year, this is often the cheapest and simplest path, because it removes the idle months entirely.
ZENIN CLOUD is built around exactly that model — $70 for 7 days ($10/day), pay-per-use, with no contract, no cancellation step and no sales call. There is no plan-based participant cap (it handles hundreds to thousands of people on one live word cloud), everything collected exports as CSV, and participants join by QR code only — no app, no login, no numeric code to read out. For a single large event a year, that is the difference between a $70 charge and a full annual seat.
One event-day difference is worth calling out because it does not appear in any pricing table: moderation of anonymous posts. When a word cloud is on the big screen, one abusive submission is visible to the whole room instantly. ZENIN CLOUD uses an AI classifier to judge each Japanese post rather than matching a fixed word-list, so it does not depend on a filter being up to date — useful when the audience is anonymous and you cannot station someone to approve every entry. If your event runs in Japanese, note too that ZENIN's admin, participant screens and support are all Japanese, where the international tools default to an English dashboard.
How to decide in one session
You do not need a spreadsheet. Three checks settle which model fits.
Take your biggest planned session and add ~30% for people joining from a second device. Under 50 in a given month, free may cover it; over 50, free is out.
Once or twice a year, an annual per-presenter subscription is mostly idle — price a pay-per-use tool instead. Most weeks, the subscription and its template library win.
If a post-event export or saved record is a deliverable, the free plan is ruled out on its own — it neither exports nor saves results.
ZENIN CLOUD is $70 for 7 days ($10/day), card checkout only, with no contract or cancellation, no plan-based participant cap, QR-only joining and CSV export on every use. If you want the practical craft of running the session itself, how to run a live word cloud covers the prompts that actually get responses, and our pay-per-event Mentimeter comparison goes deeper on the billing maths.
Will the free plan actually cover your event?
If two or more of these are true, the free plan will stop you mid-event — price the paid tier or a pay-per-use tool first.
Frequently asked questions
How many participants does the Mentimeter free plan allow?
The free plan allows up to 50 participants per month. Crucially, this is cumulative across every session you run in the month, not a limit per presentation — so two mid-sized sessions in the same month can exhaust the allowance. The counter resets on the day of the month you signed up.
Is the Mentimeter participant limit per session or per month?
Per month, and cumulative. Every unique participant across all your presentations in that month counts toward the same 50-person total. It is not reset per presentation, which is why a single all-hands or workshop can use up the whole month at once.
Can you export or save results on the Mentimeter free plan?
No. On the free plan you cannot export results to Excel, and results are not saved after the session ends — you have to screenshot them live or lose the data. Excel and PDF export only unlock on paid plans, so if a saved record or report is a deliverable, the free plan will not produce one.
What happens when you hit the 50-participant limit during a presentation?
Mentimeter does not kick anyone out. It gives a grace period of roughly 8 hours to finish an ongoing session even after you pass 50 participants, so a single live presentation can exceed the cap. But you will not be able to start another live session until your monthly limit resets.
Does the Mentimeter free plan put a badge on the screen?
Yes. Free presentations show a "Powered by Mentimeter" badge to participants. Removing it is a paid feature, which matters mainly for client-facing or branded events rather than internal sessions.
Is there a cheaper alternative to a Mentimeter subscription for one event?
For an occasional event, a pay-per-use tool avoids an annual per-presenter subscription entirely. ZENIN CLOUD, for example, is $70 for 7 days ($10/day) with no contract, no plan-based participant cap and CSV export included — so a single large event is a one-off charge rather than a year-long commitment.
No contract, no participant cap, results exported as CSV. Buy 7 days and use them whenever your event lands.
No contract, no sales call, no cancellation. Card checkout only — pick your days one at a time.