DEV Community: The Free Tier

Every AI coding tool's free tier, compared — and what they won't tell you

The Free Tier — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 06:42:11 +0000

Verified against official pricing pages and docs on July 5, 2026. These numbers change without notice — if you spot a stale one, tell us and we'll fix it with a changelog entry.

Every AI coding assistant has a free tier. Almost none of them will tell you, in numbers, what it contains.

We pulled the official pricing pages and docs for eight tools and graded each on one axis: does the company publish hard numbers for what you get — or vibes? Scale: HARD NUMBERS / PARTIAL / VAGUE.

The one that answers the question

GitHub Copilot is the only tool of the eight that publishes complete numbers at every tier: 2,000 completions a month free; $10/mo buys unlimited completions plus exactly 1,500 monthly AI credits (1,000 base + 500 flex), with a published conversion rate — one credit is one US cent — and published credit tables all the way up the tier ladder (docs.github.com). You can compute what you're buying. Nobody else in this table fully lets you.

The vibes-based economy

Cursor publishes a real dollar number for API agent usage on Pro ($20 of it per month, cursor.com) — then describes the other, larger bucket as "generous Auto and Composer usage." How generous? Not a published number. The free Hobby tier is just "limited." Limited to what? Also not a number. One more thing, because stale SEO posts keep claiming otherwise: Cursor's 7-day Pro trial no longer exists. Cursor staff confirmed the removal on the official forum in January 2026 and reconfirmed in June (forum.cursor.com). If a blog tells you there's a trial, check its date.

Windsurf rebuilt its billing around a "quota" in March 2026 and describes it as "light" (free) or — you guessed it — "generous" (paid). Credit where due: its own blog publishes estimated daily message ranges per model class (e.g., 7–27 messages/day on top-tier models for free users, explicitly labeled estimates — devin.ai/blog), and the dual daily+weekly reset is documented, including the genuinely thoughtful detail that the daily quota exceeds 1/7 of the weekly one so weekend coders aren't punished. Hedged ranges beat adjectives. Still not commitments.

Replit publishes a hard number for paid ($25 of credits on Core) and none at all for free: "daily credits… up to a monthly cap." Neither the daily amount nor the cap appears anywhere in the official docs (docs.replit.com).

v0 publishes what looks like the table's second complete answer — $5/month in free credits plus a daily message limit — until you find Vercel staff on the forums explaining the daily limit fluctuates with regional server load. A published number that isn't a promise is a new genre.

The two that tell you nothing

Claude Code comes with Claude Pro ($20/mo). Anthropic's official answer to "how much usage?" is: "at least five times the usage per session compared to our free service" (support.claude.com) — five times a free-tier number that is published nowhere. There's a 5-hour session reset and a weekly cap on top; no quantities for either.

Google Antigravity (which absorbed the old free Gemini CLI/Code Assist path) gives free users "basic weekly rate limits" and AI Pro subscribers a "high, generous quota, refreshed every five hours" (antigravity.google/docs/plans). Numbers: none. Upper tiers are sold as "5X" and "20X" a base that — say it with us — is not published.

The asterisk: OpenAI's split personality

Consumer-facing ChatGPT pricing describes Codex access as "Limited" (free) and "Expanded… Limits apply" (paid). Meanwhile OpenAI's developer-facing Codex pricing page publishes actual numeric per-5-hour usage ranges by plan and model. Same company, same product: adjectives for consumers, numbers for developers. Draw your own conclusion about which audience they think checks.

Bottom line

Want to know exactly what you're buying? Copilot is the only complete answer at every tier. Best hedged-but-honest attempt: Windsurf's published estimate ranges. Wildly capable free tier, zero committed numbers: Antigravity (real frontier-model access on the $0 plan — you just can't know how much). If a tool's own pricing page won't commit to a number, assume the number can change the day after you subscribe. That's not cynicism; that's what "limits may vary" means.

No referral links in this post. Sources are linked inline; all quotes pulled July 5, 2026.

Hyperagent's $1,000 Free Credits: Legit or Scam? I Tested It

The Free Tier — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 06:27:14 +0000

Reddit is currently split on Hyperagent's $1,000 signup credit offer. Half the threads call it a scam. The other half are deleted comments. We signed up, ran real tasks, screenshotted the balance, and read the terms of service — specifically §6.6, which is where the interesting part lives.

Here is what we found.

What Hyperagent is

Hyperagent is an AI agent platform — you give it tasks, it executes them autonomously using a browser and code environment. The $1,000 in signup credits is the current new-user offer. That is a real number, credited to a real account, usable against real compute.

The test

We signed up and verified the credit balance immediately after onboarding. The $1,000 appeared in the account dashboard within minutes of signup — no delay, no support ticket required, no "pending" state.

We then ran a representative set of tasks to verify the credits were functional and not cosmetic:

A multi-step research task (web browsing + document synthesis)
A form-filling automation sequence
A code generation and execution task

All three ran. Credits decremented visibly and consistently with the task complexity. The platform is not vaporware.

The fine print: §6.6

"Credits expire 12 months from the date of issuance unless otherwise specified in a separate written agreement."
— Hyperagent Terms of Service, §6.6 (verified July 5, 2026)

Twelve months is a real window — long enough to be genuinely useful, short enough to matter if you sign up and forget about it. The expiry is not buried; it is in the standard terms at a findable section number. We are citing it here because "free credits" with an expiry that you don't know about is the most common way a LEGIT offer becomes a CAVEATS one in practice.

There is no published conversion rate between credits and compute time in a way that lets you predict exactly how many tasks $1,000 covers — usage varies by task complexity. This is a real limitation. Budget conservatively if you are planning a specific project around the credit balance.

The lookalike problem

Before you sign up: the canonical domain is hyperagent.com. There is also a hyperagents.online (plural, different TLD) with a low trust score on Scamadviser. Half of the "is this a scam?" discourse online is people who landed on the wrong domain. The referral link in this post resolves to hyperagent.com — verify the URL bar before you enter anything.

Verdict

LEGIT. The $1,000 is real, the platform works, and the terms are findable. The caveats — expiry in §6.6, no hard per-task cost table — are real but not disqualifying. Sign up with your eyes open to the 12-month clock.

— The Free Tier

Disclosure: This post contains a referral link to Hyperagent. If you sign up through it, we may receive a benefit. A plain, non-referral link sits directly next to it — your choice, same product, same offer. The referral relationship does not change the verdict.

Referral link: https://hyperagent.com/refer/68E9HCPZ
Plain link (no referral): https://hyperagent.com

Both links go to the same offer. The referral link benefits this publication if you use it. The verdict is the same either way.

Welcome to The Free Tier

The Free Tier — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 06:27:10 +0000

"Free" is currently the most profitable word in AI.

Free credits. Free tiers. Free trials. $1,000 signup bonuses. Every AI company is throwing free at you, because free is how you acquire users in a land grab — and because almost nobody checks what "free" actually means before the meter starts running.

We checked. That's the whole publication.

What we do

We sign up for AI tools' free tiers, credit offers, and trials — and we test them like skeptics, because we are. We run real tasks. We screenshot the balances. We read the terms-of-service sections nobody reads, and we quote them with section numbers so you don't have to take our word for anything.

Then we give you a verdict. Just one of three:

LEGIT — the offer is what it says it is. Here are the receipts.
CAVEATS — real, but the fine print bites. Here's exactly where.
SKIP — not worth your time or your inbox. Here's why.

A review site that never says "skip" is an ad. We'll say it.

Why this needs to exist

Here's a preview of the problem, from research for our first comparison pieces. We audited the official pricing pages of fourteen AI products — coding assistants and chat subscriptions — and asked one question: does the company publish an actual number for what you get?

Almost none do. You'll see language like "generous limits." "Expanded usage." "5x more than Free" — five times a number they never tell you. One company's paid plans run on a "shared weekly usage pool" with no published quantity of anything. Another tells consumers "limits apply" while publishing the real numbers in a separate developer doc it assumes you won't find.

Exactly one coding tool and one chatbot publish complete, unambiguous numbers. We'll name every name in the next two weeks.

The fine print isn't an accident. It's a strategy. Someone should read it professionally.

How we make money (read this — it's short)

When a service we review has a referral program, we may include a referral link. Three permanent rules:

It's always labeled — you will never wonder.
A plain, non-referral link always sits next to it — your choice, same product, usually the same bonus.
Referral programs don't buy verdicts. If an offer is bad, we say skip, referral or not. The fastest way to die as a fine-print blog is to hide things in the fine print.

No sponsored posts. No affiliate-fluff listicles. No fake urgency — if we cite a deadline, we've seen it on the offer page ourselves, dated.

What's coming

The test that started this: a certain AI platform is handing out $1,000 in signup credits, and Reddit is split between "scam" and deleted comments. We signed up so you don't have to. (Spoiler: more interesting than either side thinks.)

Every AI coding assistant's free tier, compared — with the published-vs-vague audit per tool.

The $20 question — we asked what six major AI subscriptions actually sell you per month. One company answered with a number.

The lookalike-domain problem — the actual scam hiding inside viral credit offers, and the 60-second check that beats it.

Subscribe if you want the receipts. Unsubscribe anytime — no hard feelings, and we won't make you find the fine print to do it.

— The Free Tier

No referral links in this post.