Free vs Paid ATS Checker

We sell a paid one and publish a free one, so this is written to be useful whichever you end up using. The short version: free tools answer "how does this read", paid tools answer "what exactly do I change". Most people only need the second one once.

From the team behind PassATS. Free to read, no email required.

What free checkers genuinely do

A free checker will give you a number and a short list of observations. That is worth having. If your resume scores badly across three different free tools, something structural is wrong and you have learned it for nothing.

They are also fast. Thirty seconds, no decision to make. As a first sanity check before you spend anything, including on us, that is the right first move.

Where they stop, and why

The advice is about resumes, not your resume. "Add more quantifiable achievements" is true of almost every resume ever written. It does not tell you that the third bullet of your Revolut role says "drove growth initiatives" and needs a number.

The specifics are usually the upsell. That is not dishonest, it is the business model: the free score is the advertisement for the paid report. Worth knowing before you assume the free tier is the whole product.

Many read pasted text, not your file. This is the one that matters most and the one nobody mentions. If the tool asks you to paste, it never opened your document, so it cannot tell you that your contact details failed to extract or that your content came out in an order nobody would choose.

You usually pay in data. An email address at minimum, and often the resume itself, kept. Read what you are agreeing to before you upload, on any tool, ours included.

What a paid report should add

If a paid tool gives you a bigger number and a longer list of generic advice, you have bought a longer advertisement. The things worth paying for are specific:

Your own lines, quoted back. A fix you can act on names the section and the sentence. Anything else is a reading list.

What each fix is worth. Ranked by impact, so you know which two to do tonight and which can wait.

What the parser actually received. Not what the page looks like: what came out of it.

Things you cannot see yourself. Text set in 2pt type or white on white, which templates and "optimisers" add without telling you, and which you cannot find by reading your own document.

How to decide without spending anything

Run the free check first. Every time. If it comes back clean and your problem is that your bullets read flat, you do not have a parsing problem and no paid checker will fix your writing for you.

Then do the extraction test, which is free everywhere: open your resume, select all, copy, paste into a plain text editor with no formatting. Read what appears. Missing contact details, scrambled sections, or text you did not write mean the file is failing before any human reads it.

Our free parse preview does that step more precisely and still costs nothing and takes no email. Use it, then decide.

Pay only when you know what you are buying: the specific lines to change, ranked.

When a subscription beats both

If you are applying at volume, tailoring for each posting over months, per-scan pricing is the wrong shape and a subscription is the rational buy. We are not the right product for that and say so in the full comparison.

One-off pricing suits the opposite case: a handful of applications that matter, in a week that matters.