Round-ups of free AI tools tend to list fifteen of them. Mine has about six things on it, two of which nobody markets as AI at all, and the one that told me the most this month was a short shell script. This is an inventory of what is actually open while I work, what each free tier really allows, and the three places where I stopped being able to avoid paying.
What is actually open on my machine
I run two WordPress blogs on shared hosting, a small Node service on a VPS, and a handful of static sites. On a normal working day the things in front of me are: the WordPress editor, an SEO plugin, Site Kit, Search Console in a browser tab, a terminal, and Claude Code inside it, which is the one AI tool on the list I pay for. That is the list. There is no automation platform, no rank tracker, no content optimiser, no scheduling suite.
I am not claiming that is optimal. It is what I actually use. The filter behind it is simple: if checking a tool’s output takes longer than doing the job myself, the tool has no place in the stack. That is the filter I would suggest to anyone building a free stack, and it eliminates most of a fifteen-item list on contact.
The free tool that told me the most is a shell script
On 20 September 2026 I wanted to know how slowly my own sites respond, so instead of reading a comparison I wrote a script around curl and ran it: five sites, two modes, five requests each, roughly two seconds apart, from a home fibre connection in Valencia, Spain. Fifty requests, one CSV, no subscription.
The short version of what it found on the two blogs: a median time to first byte of 0.46 s on one and 0.57 s on the other, a near threefold swing between the fastest and slowest of five requests, and the detail I would never have learned from an article: neither blog returns any page-cache header at all. Adding a cache-busting parameter to the URL made no difference, because there was no cache to bust.
The results for all five of my sites, with the method and its limits, are in the post about how I run my own sites, so I won’t repeat the caveats here beyond one: it measures the first byte of a homepage, not page speed and not a hosting company. What it is, is mine: measured, dated, repeatable, and worth more than any number I could have copied.
The same is true of the other unglamorous free tool on my list. Search Console is free, it reports what people actually typed before landing on your pages, and no keyword tool sells you anything more reliable than that, because everything else is an estimate of your traffic and this is a record of it. How I use it against AI-generated keyword ideas is in the post on checking keyword research against real Search Console data.
The free tiers I could actually verify
On the same day I opened the pricing pages of the tools people ask me about and wrote down what was on them. Not what I remembered. What the page said.
| Tool | What the free tier is, per the page | What it costs to leave it |
|---|---|---|
| Claude | A free tier at $0. The page publishes no message count; it pitches Free at everyday use and sells Pro as “at least 5x more usage per 5-hour session than Free” | Pro $20/month, or $17/month billed annually at $200 up front |
| Grammarly | Free tier at €0, listed as spelling and grammar, writing tone, and “Generate text with 100 AI prompts” | Pro €12/month |
| Google One and the Google AI plans | 15 GB of storage free, with no paid Gemini allowance attached | Google AI Plus €9.99/month (2 TB, “2x higher” Gemini limits); Google AI Pro €21.99/month (5 TB, “4x higher”, Deep Research) |
Two kinds of free that are not free
The free tiers in that table are real. The trouble starts with the tools that are not in it.
- A trial, or nothing at all, called a free plan. Two writing tools people ask me about had no free plan on their own pricing pages when I read them: one offers seven days on its paid plan, the other says “Start free” and lists no free plan. Seven days of access is a demonstration; it ends, and then there is a payment. An earlier page on this site still praised one of them for its “generous free plan”. Both pages, and how that sentence got published, are in my notes on AI writing tools.
- A free tier with different terms attached. Usage caps are the visible limit. The one that catches people out is commercial use, which on image and design tools in particular can differ between the free and paid tiers of the same product. That is a licence question, and the only place to answer it is the vendor’s own page on the day. I go into why in the post on image generators.
The pattern behind both is the same, and it is worth naming: nobody who writes those sentences is lying on purpose. They are filling a slot in a template that requires a free recommendation, and the template does not care whether one exists.
Where the free stack ends and I pay
Three places, and only one of them is an AI subscription.
The first is the assistant itself. I work in Claude Code, and Claude’s pricing page puts Claude Code in the paid plans, not the free one; the Pro price is in the table above. It is the one subscription here I would keep if I had to cut everything else.
The second is hosting, because a site has to live somewhere. The third is the VPS that runs a small service of mine, because shared hosting cannot run a Node process, keep it alive with systemd or hold its own TLS certificates. That is not a preference, it is a capability the cheaper product does not have, and that is the only kind of upgrade I trust.
The number worth carrying away from that is not the headline price but the renewal. On Hostinger’s shared hosting page on 20 September 2026, the entry price of $2.99 a month required paying for 48 months up front and renewed at $10.99 a month — roughly three and a half times higher. The VPS page the same day listed the smallest plan at $6.49 a month on a 24-month prepaid term, renewing at $11.99. Those are the published list prices, not what this site pays; I signed up at a different time and on different terms, and I am not going to present my invoice as the market rate.
Read every subscription that way. The cost of a tool is the renewal multiplied by how long you will actually keep it, not the promotional first term. A $12-a-month writing assistant is $144 a year and a habit you will not cancel.
The test I apply before paying for anything
- Have I hit the ceiling, or do I just expect to? If I cannot name the specific limit that stopped me this week, I am buying headroom.
- Is the paid tier a different capability or a bigger allowance? Capabilities are worth paying for. Allowances usually mean I should batch my work better.
- What is the renewal price, and what happens to my work if I stop paying? Anything that holds my content hostage loses on this question alone.
- Does it replace something I am already paying for? Two tools that overlap by eighty per cent is the commonest way a small budget leaks.
What no free tier will do for you
Everything that makes a page worth publishing. Checking whether a claim is true. Measuring something yourself. Knowing which of your own pages are duplicates of each other. Deciding what to leave out. I learned this the expensive way: this site was turned down by an ad network four times for low-value content, and not one of those rejections would have been prevented by a better tool or a paid tier.
So: start with the free tiers, all of them, and be sceptical of any article — this one included — that tells you a plan is free without a date and a link. Check the page yourself. It takes four minutes and it is the single highest-value free tool in this entire category.
For what each chatbot vendor publishes about its own limits, and which ones I have never tested, see the chatbot comparison.