The Free Plan Is 30 Minutes a Month. Two in Three Real Interviews Are Longer.
We measured 410 real interview sessions. The median is 35 minutes; two in three run past 30. The Starter plan's whole month fits inside one call — here is what that means for yours, and what we are changing.
You installed GeekBye because you have an interview coming up. Maybe you ran it once on a practice call to see the answers appear. Then the real one arrives, you press Listen, and the app tells you the month is used up.
That is not a bug. It is the free plan working exactly as designed — and the design is wrong. This post shows you the numbers we looked at, what the limit actually does, and what we are doing about it.
What the Starter plan includes
The Starter plan includes 30 minutes of Listen audio per calendar month. It resets on the 1st. Pro is configured with no practical monthly budget.
The 30 minutes are checked when you start a session. If the month is used, the app refuses to start and shows this:
You've used all your audio time for this month.
Upgrade to PRO for 100x More Listen Time — Unlock way more Listen time and advanced features with PRO. View Plans
A session that is already running is never interrupted by the monthly limit. That matters, and we will come back to it. But it means the limit does not bite in the middle of a call. It bites at the start of the next one — usually the one you installed the app for.
How long a real interview runs
We measured every Listen session on GeekBye from May 1 to September 8, 2026, and kept the 410 that ran 20 minutes or longer — the ones that look like an interview rather than a test.
| Real sessions (20 min or longer) | n | Median | 90th percentile | Longer than 40 min | Longer than 60 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free users | 85 | 35 min | 80 min | 41% | 15% |
| Pro users | 325 | 36 min | 68 min | 41% | 14% |
Two things stand out.
Free and Pro users run the same interviews. Same median, same tail. Whatever the free plan selects for, it is not shorter calls.
Two in three real interviews are longer than the entire free month — and the quarter-mark is 26 minutes, so even a short round nearly uses it. One call — a single technical round, one panel — spends the whole allowance, and the calendar has to roll over before Listen works again.
That matches what the interview guides say. Indeed's guide, updated March 2025, puts technical interviews at 45 to 60 minutes and in-person rounds at 45 to 90; most interviews "last between 15 minutes and 90 minutes," and final or panel rounds "can take two hours or more." The only round a 30-minute month reliably covers is the recruiter phone screen — the one where nobody needs real-time help.
What that means in your first week
New users who run at least one real session in their first week run a median of 42 minutes across them, with an average of 1.6 sessions. The 75th percentile is 76 minutes — two and a half months of the free budget in seven days.
So the typical path is: one call fits, the second does not start. If the first call was a practice run, the interview that matters is the one that gets refused.
What happens when people hit the wall
Of 298 free users who used Listen at all since May, 58 reached the previous 40-minute limit. Of those 58, 2 upgraded. The other 54 never paid. A 30-minute month would have stopped 82 of them, and 65% of free users' first real call runs longer than 30 minutes on its own.
Compare that with how people actually buy GeekBye: two thirds of our paying customers used the free plan first — a median of 11 minutes of audio and about ten answers — and upgraded a couple of hours after signing up. The trial converts. The wall does not. We had been running both and calling them the same thing.
What we are changing
The free plan should let you run one complete interview, however long it is, and stop you between interviews rather than before the one you need. So we are replacing the monthly minute budget with a session count: a fixed number of full Listen sessions, no clock on any of them. A 90-minute panel uses one session, not two months.
We have not put a date on it yet. When it ships, this post will say so.
If your interview is this week
Until the session-based plan ships, the way to make sure Listen starts when you press it is the first month of Pro. It removes the monthly budget entirely — there is no 30-minute wall, and nothing to run out of mid-search.
The first month is discounted — the current price is in the offer box below — and you can cancel from your dashboard before the second month if the job search is over. Undetectability is included on every plan, so nothing changes about how the app hides; the only thing you are buying is that it starts.
The numbers in this post are aggregates over GeekBye sessions and never identify an individual user. Session length is the recorded duration of a Listen session; sessions under 20 minutes were excluded as tests, and a handful over six hours were excluded as left open. Interview-length norms are from Indeed. If you hit the limit and it cost you an interview, tell us — it helps us size the session count right.
