Yes — one free tier per server, and it needs no Stripe account at all. Members on it never count toward the 15-paid-member cap, however many of them there are.
A Discord role members can join for nothing. There is no checkout, no card and no Stripe object behind it — which is why you can publish one before you have connected Stripe at all, and why a community that never charges for anything can run on flatpass indefinitely.
One per server. It joins members the same way a paid tier does: they open your invite page, authorise with Discord, and land back in your server with the role applied.
flatpass’s own plan is metered on paying members. A member on a free tier is not one, and is not counted — there is no number of free members that moves you onto a paid plan.
Comped members don’t count either: a 100%-off code creates a membership with nothing to bill, so there is no subscription to meter. A member on a discounted-but-paying subscription does count.
Whether a tier is free is fixed at creation, and flatpass has no way to convert one afterwards in either direction. Turning a paid tier free would have to end every live subscription on it, and turning a free tier paid would have to decide what happens to everyone who joined for nothing — so neither happens as a side effect of an edit.
The practical trap: if you are waiting for Stripe onboarding and make the role free in the meantime, that role stays free. Publish it once Stripe is connected instead. If you have already done it, archive the free tier and publish the paid one on a different role — which is what the dashboard means when it says your server already has a free tier and to archive it first.
What you can edit on a free tier afterwards is its description and whether it is the recommended one. Nothing else.
A free join is still a role grant, so the same two things have to be true: the flatpass role sits above the role being granted, and the bot still holds Create Invite, which is what lets it add somebody who isn’t in your server yet. Without that permission a free tier turns away anyone arriving from a shared link.
Nothing for 7 days — signups keep working and the dashboard counts down. Only then do new checkouts pause; existing members are never touched.
Add the bot, connect Stripe, pick a role, set a price — about ten minutes, most of it Stripe's own identity check.
Archive it. The tier comes off your invite page at once, you choose whether current members keep their access or end at their period's end, and Restore puts it back. There's no hard delete.