SwissJobs.app or FlowCV — what does the free builder really do?

Feature comparison

As of 4 September 2026. "not stated" means it could not be read on their own site — not "does not exist". Our rows come from the code (lib/stripe/trialConfig.ts) and from walking the live flow, not from marketing copy.

Pricing side by side

As of 4 September 2026. "not stated" means it could not be read on their own site — not "does not exist". Our rows come from the code (lib/stripe/trialConfig.ts) and from walking the live flow, not from marketing copy.

What the free plan actually contains — read, not remembered

On flowcv.com/pricing, read on 4 September 2026, the free plan sits under "$0 /month" with "Free forever" and "No credit card required". Five lines follow: "1 resume and 1 cover letter", "Unlimited PDF downloads", "No watermarks or branding", "All resume templates", "Full design customization". For this industry that is unusually straight. No watermark, no card, no trial clock — the three tricks that most free tiers turn on are genuinely absent here.

The consideration is in the same box: the number one. And the FAQ spells out what happens if you come back down from Pro. Only the first CV stays editable and downloadable, because "additional versions remain safely stored in your account but are locked until you upgrade again". The other versions are frozen rather than deleted.

What Pro adds is explicitly quantity and AI: "Unlimited resumes", "Unlimited cover letters", "Unlimited imports", "Job Application Tracker", "AI features". USD 5 a month, billed as USD 60 a year — roughly CHF 48 at the rate we used for our price comparison on 28 August 2026. The amount is set in dollars and moves with the exchange rate; our franc prices do not. The page also names a 14-day money-back window and a 25 per cent student discount for three years on a verified university email address.

Our free allowance is cut differently. Trying costs nothing and needs no account — the generator runs anonymously and the account is asked for to save and from the second document, with an email address and no card. After that a free account allows 5 documents a day and 10 per rolling week, counted the same way for CVs, cover letters and AI edit prompts. Beyond that there are 7 free days, then CHF 15 a month or CHF 95 a year, cancellable any time. Said plainly: if you genuinely need one document and no more, FlowCV is cheaper, because there the download stays free permanently.

One CV means one language, and Switzerland has four

FlowCV answers the language question in its own FAQ, and the sentence is worth reading twice: "Many users keep one resume per language; upgrading lets you save and manage multiple versions easily." One CV per language — offered as an observation of their own users. In a single-language country that is a footnote. Here it is the whole thing.

Across the open adverts in our index with a detectable language, 53.6 per cent are written in German, 30.4 per cent in English, 14.0 per cent in French and 2.0 per cent in Italian. If your one CV is in English, it does not match the written language of 69.6 per cent of the pool. If it is in German, 46.4 per cent.

The canton view is sharper still. Of the adverts we can place in a canton, 95.3 per cent sit in a canton where at least two advert languages each clear ten per cent. Geneva is the case that surprises people arriving from abroad: 53.7 per cent of Geneva adverts are written in English against 45.3 per cent in French, so English is the larger advert language there, not the smaller. Zug is 51.6 per cent English. Zurich is 53.3 per cent German against 45.8 per cent English. Ticino is 74.1 per cent Italian with 22.6 per cent English behind it.

That produces one honest recommendation and one honest counter-recommendation. If you are applying in English into Geneva, Zug or Zurich and nowhere else, one English CV covers most of what you will see, and FlowCV's free plan is enough. If your search crosses a language border — and in Switzerland the borders are twenty minutes apart — you need a second version, and at FlowCV the second version is the paid tier.

Pick English (UK), not English (US) — the page size is different

This is the most practical thing an arriving applicant can take from FlowCV, and their own settings hide it in plain sight. The document language you choose does not only change the section labels; it changes the paper. In FlowCV's configuration the English (US) setting carries the page format "Letter" and dates written MM/DD/YYYY, and it calls the opening section "Summary". English (UK) carries "A4", dates as DD/MM/YYYY, and calls the same section "Profile". Every other language in their list — German, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, the Nordic languages, Japanese — is A4.

Switzerland is an A4 country. A CV exported at US Letter is 18 millimetres shorter and 6 millimetres wider than the paper it lands on, which shows up as a reflowed final page and a print dialogue that offers to scale it. Nobody rejects an application over it, but it is the kind of detail a Swiss recruiter registers as "written somewhere else". If you use FlowCV from an American keyboard habit, switch that setting.

It is worth saying that this is a CV and not a resume. The Swiss dossier is a folder, not a single sheet: arbeit.swiss lists "personal details, including photograph" and "language skills" as parts of the CV and says it "should be no longer than three pages", and a full application usually travels with Arbeitszeugnisse — the written references a Swiss employer issues on leaving, which have no American equivalent. A tool built for a one-page US resume is not wrong, it is aimed elsewhere.

How Swiss adverts actually state a language requirement

On 4 September 2026 we took a deterministic random sample of 400 open adverts from our own index, excluding apprenticeships and internships, and read the real advert text rather than a summary. Half of them — 50.3 per cent — name a language at all. Of those, 45.3 per cent describe the level in words ("very good German", "business fluent", "mother tongue") and only 12.4 per cent name a CEFR level such as B2 or C1.

Split by the language the advert is written in, the difference is large. German-language adverts name a CEFR level in 16.3 per cent of the cases that mention a language; French-language adverts in 16.1 per cent; English-language adverts in 4.9 per cent, against 50.8 per cent that use a word. So if you are reading English adverts, you will almost always be answering a phrase, not a scale.

That is first of all a point in FlowCV's favour. Their language levels are words, and words are the more common form: Basic, Conversational, Proficient, Fluent, Native/Bilingual. But two things follow anyway. Where an advert does ask for B2 — and roughly one in six German-language adverts that mention a language does — that fixed five-step scale has no B2 to give. And because nearly half the adverts name no language at all while the rest split between words and levels, there is no correct default. The CV that matches an advert echoes that advert's own phrasing, which means having the advert in front of you while the CV is being written.

The fields a Swiss dossier needs

FlowCV's personal-details form is generous. Alongside name, email and phone it offers date of birth, availability, work mode, relocation, security clearance, weight, height, expected salary, nationality, marital status, an ID or passport number, gender or pronoun, military service, driving licence, disability and a field called "Visa". There is no field for a Swiss work permit; "Visa" is the nearest thing and it means something else.

For an application in Switzerland that is the point at which an international tool hands work back to you. Non-Swiss applicants are expected to state their permit — B, C, G or the fact of Swiss or EU citizenship — and it belongs near the top of the CV rather than in a footnote. On our side it comes out of your profile and sits in the header without you having to find a place for it.

The second Swiss item is the Arbeitszeugnis — the written reference a Swiss employer issues when you leave. FlowCV's section list runs Personal Details, Summary, Education, Professional Experience, Skills, Languages, Interests, Courses, Projects, Awards, Organizations, References, Certificates, Publications, Declaration. The "References" section actually fits Swiss practice well: arbeit.swiss suggests noting in the CV that references can be given on request. The Arbeitszeugnis is not a section, though. It is a separate document, and arbeit.swiss asks for all of them, gapless and in reverse chronological order, "compiled in one PDF file" together with diplomas and certificates. That is the real difference from single-sheet thinking: a Swiss application is a folder, and the CV is one item in it.

What FlowCV gets right, and it should not get lost here, is the photograph. It is on by default, with a greyscale switch, three sizes and several positions, and their own guidance says the photo should be no more than two years old and the clothing should match the target role. On nationality and date of birth they even write that both are "generally NOT recommended, however it is required in some countries" — careful, internationally correct advice. For Switzerland arbeit.swiss points the other way and lists personal details including a photograph as part of the CV.

Where FlowCV clearly wins

Design, and not narrowly. Their template gallery links 109 individual design pages — the site itself advertises a modest "50+" — plus 50 worked examples by occupation. The fonts number 46 in the Latin script across four groups: 15 sans-serif, 14 serif, 6 monospaced and 11 display faces, with separate sets for Arabic, Hebrew and Japanese. The accent colour is a palette plus free entry of any value.

We have 54 design variations, and the number is a multiplication rather than a collection: 2 layouts times 3 fonts times 9 accent colours, all on one Swiss format. That is a different ambition — we vary one format, they hand you a design tool. If you work in design, advertising or media and the document itself is meant to be a work sample, take FlowCV. We lose that comparison and it is not close.

Second, the price of a single application. Their first CV stays downloadable for nothing, permanently. Ours moves into the trial and then the subscription once the free allowance runs out. Someone writing one application and planning no second one would be paying us for something they can have for nothing — that is not a quibble, it is the right answer for that reader.

Third, two small things we simply do not have: a shareable web link to the CV, and imports in several formats — PDF, Word, PNG and JPEG up to ten megabytes, or pasted text, three times on the free plan.

Two places where their own site contradicts itself

Reading carefully turned up two contradictions, and we write them down because they bear directly on the question here. First the application tracker. The pricing page lists "Job Application Tracker" in the Pro column, under "Includes all Free features, plus". The tracker's own product page answers the question "Is the Job Tracker included in the basic plan?" with "Yes, the Job Tracker is included in the basic plan." Both sentences were live on 4 September 2026. We did not create an account and cannot say which is right; anyone who needs the tracker should check inside the product before deciding.

Second, the template count, and this one goes in their favour: the site says "50+", the gallery links 109. Understating is the rarer mistake.

For completeness, because it is part of what "the free builder does": at FlowCV the sign-up is attached to downloading and to importing rather than to opening the editor — that is what the publicly served code of their application says, read on 4 September, including a running experiment on the wording of that very prompt. We opened no account there, so we are reporting what their pages and code state, not a flow we walked. Our own build works the same way: write without an account, account to save and from the second document.

Who should take which

You need exactly one well-designed CV, never want to pay and never want to leave a card: FlowCV. It is the most honest free plan in this comparison, and in a single-language canton one CV covers nearly the whole market — Thurgau adverts are 96.1 per cent German, Aargau 86.2 per cent.

The document itself is meant to be a work sample — design, advertising, media: FlowCV. 109 templates and 46 fonts against 54 variations of one format is not a close call.

You are applying steadily to Swiss adverts and want a separate dossier per job, in the language of that advert, with the permit line and the photo already in the right place, exported as PDF and as an unwatermarked Word file: SwissJobs.app. That includes the Swiss job-search-efforts sheet built from the applications you have tracked — we produce the filled sheet, your RAV decides whether it recognises it, and your efforts still have to be recorded where they legally count.

You are arriving from outside Switzerland and working in English: both tools work, and FlowCV's English-only interface is a genuine advantage for you where it is a limitation for a Romand or a Ticinese reader. Decide by how many applications you are going to send, not by the price. At one, FlowCV wins. At the second language, we do.