Which AI Apps Still Have a Real Free Plan?
Every vendor on this page says it has a free plan. Some of them mean a monthly allowance you can use forever. Others mean a handful of credits that never refill, or output you are not allowed to download. Those are completely different products and the pricing pages call both of them free.
Genuinely usable
34 appsAn allowance that renews. You can use these indefinitely without paying, within the limits shown.
The agent itself is MIT-licensed and free to self-host with your own API keys. Nous Portal has a $0 tier limited to free models.
10,000 words/month, 1 user
Free for verified students, teachers, and maintainers of popular open-source projects
What it costs once you outgrow it →2,000 completions, 50 premium messages/month
What it costs once you outgrow it →Open source, can run locally for free
Basic Magic features included in free Canva plan
What it costs once you outgrow it →Included in Figma's free tier with limits
Free tier available, limits not published.
What it costs once you outgrow it →125 credits (~1 min video), 3 projects
10,000 characters/month, 3 voices
1 hour transcription/month, basic features
What it costs once you outgrow it →Free CRM with limited AI features
Free tier with GPT-4o mini, limited messages
Free tier with Claude, limited messages
What it costs once you outgrow it →Unlimited quick searches, 5 Pro searches/day
Limited AI responses on free Notion plan
What it costs once you outgrow it →100 tasks/month, 5 zaps, limited AI features
What it costs once you outgrow it →Grammar, spelling, tone detection
300 minutes/month, 30 minutes per conversation
10,000 characters/month
Limited paraphrasing, 125 words in summarizer
10 rewrites per day
1,000 words/month, basic features
Free plan with a limited agent quota, unlimited tab completions
What it costs once you outgrow it →Basic AI features included in free Replit plan
What it costs once you outgrow it →150 images/day, 30 refined images/day
75 images/day (slow queue)
50 credits/day, limited features
66 daily credits, limited features
Free plan with a capped weekly dictation allowance
Basic TTS, limited voices
Gemini with limits on free tier
Limited queries, available on X
800 minutes/storage, limited features
Trials wearing a free-plan costume
4 appsA one-time grant that never refills. Nothing wrong with a trial, but these are not free plans and they are not labelled as trials.
One credit, about three minutes of video, then it stops.
250 credits at signup, then nothing renews.
10 credits and a single brand, consumed in an afternoon.
400 credits once, and they never refill. Earn more by referral or upgrade.
What it costs once you outgrow it →
Free, but you cannot use the output
3 appsThe allowance renews and a restriction makes the result unusable for real work. Fine for evaluating, useless for shipping.
Three projects total, not three at a time.
Exports carry a watermark.
10 minutes of generation, but downloads are blocked, so you cannot use what you make.
No free plan at all
16 appsPay to try, or in a few cases pay to find out. Listed so you do not go hunting for a free tier that was never there.
How We Sorted These
The test is whether the allowance renews. A monthly cap you hit and wait out is a free plan. A grant you spend once and cannot replenish is a trial, however it is labelled, and the difference only shows up after you have built a habit on it.
The third group is the one people get caught by: the allowance does renew, and a restriction makes the output worthless anyway. A voice tool that generates ten minutes a month but blocks downloads has given you a demo, not a plan.
Free tiers move more often than paid ones, because they cost the vendor money and nobody complains to the press when one shrinks. We check these against vendor pricing pages and record what moved on the Billing Watch.
We will email you when one of these free plans shrinks
That is the whole newsletter. No weekly roundup, no tool of the day. When a vendor cuts a free tier, moves to credits, or quietly reprices, we already record it. You can have that in your inbox instead of finding out at renewal.
Free plan details come from our catalog, where each app's pricing carries the date we last checked it against the vendor's own page. Discontinued products are excluded from the counts above. Vendors change free tiers frequently and rarely announce it, so confirm before you build anything on one.