A Free Teal Alternative for the Job-Match Check
Teal is a job tracker, a resume builder and a match scorer in one. Its free plan gives you a fixed allowance of AI credits, and the job-description match scorer draws on them — run out, and that feature stops until you upgrade. If the match check is the part you keep running out of, this page is about getting that one thing without a plan.
Backed by data: we analysed 3,910 real job postings to measure how much two postings for the same job title actually have in common. The median answer is 25% — which is the whole argument for checking against the specific posting rather than the title. Read the study and its method →
What each gives you free
Teal’s published plans as of August 2026. Their pricing is quoted inconsistently across review sites — figures from $9 to $29 a month appear depending on the source and date — so treat the numbers below as indicative and check Teal directly before buying.
| Teal free | CareerLift | |
|---|---|---|
| Job-description match | Draws on a limited pool of AI credits | 3 checks per day, every day |
| Account needed | Yes | No signup, no email |
| Paid tier | Teal+ — around $13/week, $29/month or $79/quarter; no annual plan | No subscription; a one-off $19 rewrite exists |
| Also does | Job tracking, resume builder, templates, Chrome extension, cover letters, analytics | Nothing else |
Where Teal is the better tool
Teal does considerably more than this and, for someone running an organised search across many applications, does it well. The job tracker and Chrome extension are genuinely useful and have no equivalent here — this is a single-page tool with no account, so there is nothing to track anything with. If you want one place to manage a whole search, Teal is a reasonable subscription and this page is not arguing otherwise.
The narrow case follows.
No credits, and no score
Two differences worth knowing before you switch anything.
The first is that there are no credits. Three checks a day, refreshed daily, with no pool to exhaust mid-application. The limit exists because each check costs real money to run — it is what can be given away honestly rather than promised and then throttled.
The second is that there is no match score. Scores feel precise and are hard to check: you cannot see the working, and two runs can disagree. What comes back instead is a list of phrases from the posting that are literally absent from your resume, computed in code before any model runs, with case, punctuation, hyphens, plurals and verb endings folded so “Product-Led” and “product led” count as one phrase.
It then invites you to falsify it: ctrl-F any line it gives you and you should get zero hits. If one hits, that is a bug. It prints its own arithmetic and an input fingerprint, so the same resume and posting always produce the same list in the same order.
It will not invent experience for you
The model does one job: deciding whether work you have genuinely done counts as evidence for a gap, and it is instructed to be sceptical. Asked whether “managed social media accounts” could cover a posting’s paid-media requirement, it declined — different work, not the same work in different words — rather than rewriting the line to fit.
Frequently asked questions
Is the free check a limited version?
No. It is the full gap analysis; nothing is held back for a paid tier.
Can I use both?
Sensibly, yes — Teal to run and track the search, this for the specific posting in front of you when the credits have gone.
Do you store my resume?
It is never written to disk. Only the generated answer is cached, encrypted with a key derived from your resume and the posting themselves, so it cannot be decrypted without both.