Can you run a class of thirty on a free plan?

You have thirty-two students and no budget. Every quiz tool says it has a free plan. The question is whether any of them will actually let all thirty-two join, and the answer is more annoying than a single number.

Being straightforward before we start: we make Tikroo, so we are not neutral. Our own limits are in here too, including the one people find out about later, because a post that only listed someone else's constraints would be worthless to you.

Kahoot's free limit is not one number

The most common thing you will read is that Kahoot's free plan allows 40 players. That is true for some accounts and false for most.

The cap is set by account category, not by plan. From Kahoot's own participant-limits support article:

So if you signed up as a K-12 teacher, forty. If you are in higher education, or you signed up personally before you thought about it, ten. Same free plan, same features, quarter of the room.

Two things worth knowing. Assigning rather than presenting does not get around it: present and assign carry the identical limit on every free tier. And the account category is a property of how the account was created, so this is worth checking on your existing login before a lesson rather than discovering it at the start of one.

Ours, including the part people find later

Tikroo's free plan allows 100 players in a session, so a class of thirty is comfortable and so is a year group assembly.

The limit people meet later is monthly: 100 participants across all sessions in a calendar month. Thirty students is roughly three sessions and then you are done until the first. That suits a department trying it out or a teacher running something occasional. It does not suit a form tutor who wants a five-minute starter every morning, and pretending otherwise would waste your time.

The free plan also covers 18 of our activity types rather than all of them, and three saved activities at a time. The game-show formats are on the paid tiers.

The number to actually check

Whatever tool you are considering, the useful question is not "what is the player limit" but "what happens on the fourth session". Free tiers tend to advertise a per-session number, which is the flattering one, and enforce a per-month or per-account one, which is the number that ends up mattering.

Three things to establish before you plan a term around anything:

1. The per-session cap for your account type, not the one in the marketing table.
2. Whether there is a monthly or total cap underneath it, and what it counts. Participants? Sessions? Unique students?
3. What happens when you hit it. Does the session refuse extra joiners, stop working, or quietly drop them? That is the difference between an inconvenience and a lesson falling over.

What this means practically

If you are a K-12 teacher with one class and you run a quiz occasionally, most free tiers will carry you, including Kahoot's forty.

If you are in higher education, ten players makes the free tier a demo rather than a teaching tool, and that is the single most common unpleasant surprise in this category.

If you want something running most days with a full class, every free tier in this space will run out, ours included. That is what the paid tiers exist for, and it is a more honest thing to say than implying otherwise.

The bottom line

Check your account category before you check the price. On Kahoot it is the difference between 40 and 10, and it is not something the free plan itself tells you.

And on any tool, find the monthly number before the per-session one. The per-session figure is what gets advertised; the monthly figure is what decides whether the thing is still working in November.