Best Free Termly Alternative in 2026 (That Actually Lets You Keep the Document)

So here's what happened. You searched for a free privacy policy generator. Termly came up. You spent five minutes filling out their onboarding questionnaire, answered questions about your business, your data practices, whether you use cookies. You clicked the big generate button. The document appeared. It looked professional. You felt good about it.

Then you tried to download it. Or copy the HTML. Or do anything useful with it.

And that's when you found out.

You can't. Not without a paid plan. What you got, for free, is a hosted widget that lives on Termly's servers. Not a document you own. Not a file you control. A link. To their servers. That you embed in your website. And that will disappear the moment you stop paying.

This article covers exactly what Termly's free plan includes, what it doesn't, how their pricing actually works, and why FreeTOS is the best free alternative if you want a document you actually own.

What Termly Actually Is

Let's be fair first. Termly is a legitimate product. It's been around since 2018, it's used by hundreds of thousands of websites, and it's not a scam. It's a real compliance platform built by people who understand privacy law.

The core of what Termly does is generate legal documents and then host them for you. Their model is subscription-based. You pay monthly or annually, and in exchange you get hosted, auto-updating legal pages that Termly maintains as laws change.

That's a real value proposition for the right kind of customer. But it's not free. And the way the free plan is presented can genuinely mislead people who just want a document they can put on their website.

The Termly Free Plan: What You Actually Get vs. What You Think You Get

Here's the thing. The free plan does let you generate a document. You go through the questionnaire, the AI (or template system) creates a privacy policy or terms of service, and it shows up on your screen. So far so good.

But here's the problem: you can't export it.

The cookie consent banner is a different story. Termly's consent management platform, the actual pop-up banner that captures cookie consent from visitors, is available on their free plan with some limits. That part they're generous with. The legal documents themselves? Not so much.

And none of this is hidden. If you read Termly's pricing page carefully, it's all there. The issue is that people don't always read carefully when they're just trying to get a privacy policy up before they launch their website.

Why the Hosted Widget Model Is Actually a Problem

Some people shrug at this. "So what? It's just a link. My privacy policy page still loads." That's understandable. But there are real reasons to care about document ownership.

Your privacy policy is a legal document. It's the thing regulators look at when they're auditing whether your website complies with GDPR or CCPA. It's the thing users are directed to when they have questions about their data. It needs to be available. Always.

There's also the business continuity angle. If you cancel your Termly subscription and you're on the free plan, your embedded widget may stop working. If you're on a paid plan and cancel, same problem. The document isn't yours to keep. You're renting access to it.

For a small blog this might feel like overthinking. For any business that takes compliance seriously, it's a genuine concern.

Termly Pricing: What It Actually Costs

Termly's pricing in 2026 runs like this, per website, billed monthly:

• Starter: $10 per month. Basic document generation, hosted pages, branding removal.
• Professional: $20 per month. Adds GDPR and CCPA consent management, more document types.
• Business: $30 per month. Priority support, additional customization, more scan credits.

Annual billing knocks about 20% off those numbers. So on the annual Starter plan, you're looking at roughly $96 per year per website.

Now run that math if you have 3 websites. That's $288 per year at the Starter tier. For legal pages. Pages that you still don't own and that are still hosted on their infrastructure.

For a growing business with predictable revenue, that's manageable. For a freelancer, a side project, a nonprofit, or anyone just starting out, $120 to $360 per year for legal documents they don't even fully own is a real barrier.

Why People Look for Termly Alternatives

People end up searching for Termly alternatives for a handful of consistent reasons.

Price is the obvious one. $10 a month per site adds up fast. If you're running multiple projects, you're looking at a meaningful annual expense for what is essentially static content.

Document ownership is the second reason. Developers and technical founders in particular don't like the idea of a third-party server sitting between them and their own legal pages. They want the HTML. They want to version-control it. They want to self-host it.

The "Powered by Termly" branding on the free plan is a third irritant. It's not the end of the world, but it looks unprofessional and it signals to visitors that you're using someone else's free-tier infrastructure for your legal pages. Removing it costs money.

And then there's the simple case of someone who just launched their first website, needs a privacy policy to be compliant, and does not want to pay $120 a year before they've made a single dollar.

FreeTOS: The Free Termly Alternative That Gives You the Document

FreeTOS generates legal documents with AI and gives you the full HTML to download. That's it. No accounts. No monthly fees. No "Powered by FreeTOS" watermark. No hosted dependency.

Here's what that actually means in practice. You go to freetos.org, choose your document type (Terms of Service, Privacy Policy, GDPR Policy, CCPA Policy, and 18 more), fill out a short form about your business, and the AI generates a document tailored to your actual situation. Not a template with your name swapped in. A document that reflects your business model, your data practices, your jurisdiction.

Then you download the HTML. You paste it into your website. You own it. Termly having an outage at 2am doesn't affect your legal pages at all because your legal pages don't touch Termly's servers.

FreeTOS covers 22 document types including Terms of Service, Privacy Policy, GDPR Privacy Policy, CCPA Privacy Policy, Cookie Policy, Refund Policy, Shipping Policy, EULA, SaaS Terms, Acceptable Use Policy, DMCA Policy, Affiliate Disclosure, AI Content Disclaimer, Medical Disclaimer, Financial Disclaimer, Earnings Disclaimer, Data Processing Agreement, Data Retention Policy, Community Guidelines, COPPA Policy, Sponsored Content Disclosure, and Disclaimer.

All free. All downloadable. All owned by you the moment you generate them.

Termly vs. FreeTOS: Side-by-Side Comparison

When Termly IS the Right Choice

Being honest matters here. FreeTOS isn't the right tool for everyone, and I'd rather tell you that than pretend otherwise.

If you need a cookie consent banner, Termly's free plan genuinely does that well. It pops up, captures consent, categorizes cookies, and logs consent records. FreeTOS doesn't have a consent banner. It doesn't do that at all. If you're running a GDPR-compliant website with EU traffic and you need actual consent capture (not just a document saying you collect cookies), Termly's banner is worth looking at.

If you need auto-updates as privacy laws change, Termly's paid plans handle that. Laws like CCPA, VCDPA (Virginia), and the various state privacy laws that keep passing across the US change regularly. Keeping up manually takes attention. Termly's paid plans update your hosted documents automatically. FreeTOS does not do this. You'd need to regenerate your documents periodically and re-upload them.

If you're in a heavily regulated industry and need a compliance partner who takes ongoing legal responsibility for keeping your documents current, Termly's Professional or Business plan makes sense. That's not FreeTOS's purpose.

How to Switch from Termly to FreeTOS

If you're currently using Termly's embedded widget and want to switch to self-hosted documents, here's the whole process. It takes about 10 minutes.

Step 1: Generate Your New Document on FreeTOS

Go to the generator that matches your document type. If you need a Privacy Policy, go to /privacy-policy-generator. Fill out the form. The AI will ask about your business type, what data you collect, whether you have EU users, whether you use third-party analytics, and so on. Answer honestly. The output quality depends on your inputs.

Step 2: Download the HTML

Click download. You'll get a complete HTML file. Open it in a text editor if you want to review it or customize the styling to match your site.

Step 3: Upload or Paste Into Your Website

How you do this depends on your platform. On WordPress, paste the content into a new page in the HTML editor. On Webflow, create a new page and paste the HTML. On a custom site, save the file to your server (e.g., /privacy-policy.html) and update your nginx or server config if needed.

Step 4: Update Your Footer Link

Your footer currently links to the Termly-hosted widget URL. Update it to your new self-hosted page. That's /privacy-policy or wherever you put it.

Step 5: Cancel Termly If You Were on a Paid Plan

Log into Termly and cancel your subscription. Done. Your legal pages now live on your own server. No monthly fee. No third-party dependency. No performance hit from loading an external iframe widget.

Frequently Asked Questions