After going through the terms of several "free" AI tools for this project, a pattern showed up enough times that it's worth writing down as a checklist. If you're evaluating any free AI tool — not just the ones I mention here — these are the five questions that actually matter, roughly in order of how often they trip people up.
1. Does it reset, or is it one-time?
"200 free credits" reads very differently depending on whether that's a monthly refill or a signup bonus you'll never see again. I've seen both marketed with nearly identical language. Always find the renewal cadence before estimating what a free tier actually gets you over a month.
2. Is there a hard cap that breaks your use case?
A generous-sounding credit allowance doesn't help if the underlying output is capped somewhere that matters — an 8-second maximum clip length, a resolution ceiling, a rate limit that throttles bursts. Check the cap against what you're actually trying to produce, not the headline number.
3. Is commercial use explicitly allowed, explicitly excluded, or just not mentioned?
These are three different situations, and "not mentioned" is the one to be most careful about — it usually doesn't mean "allowed," it means the terms haven't been tested and you're taking on the ambiguity yourself. I went looking for a clear answer on this for one particular tool and genuinely couldn't find one in the official terms, which became the reason I changed direction on an entire project.
4. Does the free output carry a watermark or attribution requirement?
Fine for personal use, often a dealbreaker for anything public-facing or monetized. Worth checking before you build a workflow around the free tier, not after.
5. Are you reading the tool's actual terms, or someone's blog post about them?
This is the one that burned the most time. Several third-party "guides" to the same tool's free tier directly contradicted each other on basic facts — whether there's a watermark, what the daily limit actually is. Search results are full of this content, some of it clearly written to rank rather than to be accurate. When it matters, go to the source and check the date it was last updated.
The short version
"Free" is a marketing word. "Free tier" is a product decision with specific, checkable boundaries. The five questions above take about ten minutes to answer for any given tool, and they've saved me from building on the wrong foundation more than once.
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