Beginners
Chess.com Premium vs Free: Is It Worth Paying?
Affiliate disclosure: the Chess.com links on this page are affiliate links. If you start a paid membership through them, Chess Checkmate may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. Chess.com does not review or approve this page, and the advice below would be the same without the link.
A free Chess.com account already lets you play as many games as you like, at every time control, against people and against bots. What you pay for is training: more puzzles, more lessons and, above all, more computer review of your own games. Whether that is worth money depends on how you like to improve, so this guide sets out exactly what changes between the free account and the three paid tiers, using the limits Chess.com publishes in its own Help Center (checked October 2026).
What the free account gives you
Chess.com calls the free level Basic. Every new account starts there, and for casual players it is generous:
- Unlimited games. Bullet, blitz, rapid and daily (correspondence) chess, plus tournaments and variants. Playing is never limited.
- Puzzles: 3 per day.
- Puzzle Rush and Puzzle Battle: five plays on your first day, then one of each per day.
- Lessons: the free "New to Chess" section plus one extra lesson per day.
- Game Review: one full computer analysis of a game per day.
- Bots: more than 20 computer personalities, and one game per month against the Coach bot.
- Opening explorer: the first four moves only.
- Ads are shown.
If you play a few games a week and review your best or worst one, the daily Game Review is often enough. The limits start to matter when you want to train every day, or when you play several games a day and want to check all of them.
Gold: ad-free training
Gold removes the training limits that are not about game analysis. On top of everything in Basic it adds:
- No ads.
- Unlimited puzzles, unlimited lessons, and unlimited Puzzle Rush and Puzzle Battle.
- Unlimited games against the Coach bot, all 100+ computer personalities, all Drills and all Endgame practice positions.
- The full opening explorer.
- Daily-chess extras: up to 75 Daily tournaments at once, more vacation days (earn 3 per month, store up to 30) and time-out protection.
Notice what Gold does not change: you still get one full Game Review per day. Gold suits players who improve mainly through tactics and lessons rather than by going over their own games move by move.
Platinum: unlimited Game Review
Platinum includes everything in Gold and adds unlimited Game Review and analysis, plus more Daily tournaments (up to 100 at once). This is the tier that matters most for serious improvement, because reviewing your own games is where you find the mistakes you actually make: the piece you left hanging, the endgame you misplayed, the opening line you keep forgetting.
A practical test: if you regularly finish a session of rapid games and wish you could check more than one of them, Platinum is the level that removes that limit.
Diamond: coach explanations and Insights
Diamond includes everything in Platinum and adds:
- Game Review with coach explanations on all of your moves, not just a few key ones.
- Insights, which shows statistics across all your games, such as how you score with each opening and where in the game you tend to lose.
- Customizable analysis settings, Advanced Stats and Brilliant Moves.
Insights is the feature that most clearly separates Diamond. If you want to know, with data, that you lose too many games out of the Caro-Kann or in time trouble, Diamond answers that. If you just want to know where each game went wrong, Platinum already does that.
Chess.com also offers a Friends and Family plan that lets up to six people share one Diamond yearly membership, which can make sense for a household with several players.
Prices and the free trial
Chess.com sets membership prices by country, and the price you see on the membership page for your account is the one that applies (local taxes can be added at checkout). Yearly billing costs less per month than monthly billing. Because prices vary by location and change from time to time, we do not quote a number here; check the Chess.com membership page for the current price where you live.
Each account is eligible for one free 7-day trial, and you can try Gold, Platinum, Diamond or the Family plan. You are not charged if you cancel before the seven days end; if you do not cancel, it renews automatically as a paid subscription. If you try it, put a reminder in your calendar for day six.
Free alternatives worth knowing
You do not need to pay anyone to improve at chess. Lichess is free and open source, with no paid tier: unlimited games, puzzles and computer analysis for everyone, funded by donations. On this site, our analysis board runs the Stockfish engine in your browser for free, our puzzles are unlimited, and the lessons cover openings, tactics, endgames and strategy.
The honest reason to pay for Chess.com is not that its analysis is the only good one; it is that Chess.com is where many people already play, and having review, lessons and puzzles built into the same account where your games live saves time. If that convenience makes you train more often, it is worth more than any feature list.
Which one should you choose?
| If you... | Choose |
|---|---|
| Play casually and review one game a day at most | Free (Basic) |
| Train mostly with puzzles and lessons, and dislike ads | Gold |
| Want to review every game you play | Platinum |
| Want explanations on every move and stats across all your games | Diamond |
| Have several players in one household | Friends and Family (Diamond) |
How to get your money's worth
- Review before you play again. Unlimited Game Review only helps if you use it. After each serious game, find the first moment the evaluation swung and ask what you missed. Our guide to the blunder check shows a routine that prevents many of those swings.
- Do puzzles on a schedule. Fifteen focused minutes a day beats an hour of Puzzle Rush once a week. See how to study chess for a weekly plan.
- Use the trial on purpose. Start the 7-day trial in a week when you will actually play and review games, so you can judge the features on your own chess.
- Do not pay for what you will not use. If you never open Insights, Platinum gives you the same Game Review limit for less.
Ready to compare the tiers for yourself? See Chess.com membership options (affiliate link).