"Free forever" is the most expensive phrase in software procurement — not because it's usually a lie, but because it's almost always true on the day you read it. The tier exists. The ceiling exists too; it's just described somewhere else, in different words, a few clicks away from the button you pressed.
I'm not annoyed about companies charging for their work. I'm annoyed about how much work it takes to find out what you're actually getting. So here's the fifteen-minute routine I run before any free tier becomes load-bearing in my workflow — the tool my notes live in, the model my prototype calls, the API my weekend project is built on.
1. Separate the licence from the hosting
Open weights and free hosted access are two different promises that get blended together constantly.
An MIT-licensed model you can download really is free forever — the licence outlives the company. A free hosted endpoint for that same model is free until the pricing page changes, the endpoint gets deprecated, or somebody acquires the vendor.
Ask one question: if this company disappeared on Friday, what still works on Monday? If the answer is "nothing, it was only ever an API," you don't have free forever. You have free until further notice. That can still be fine — just don't build permanence assumptions on it.
2. Read the quota language like you mean it
Free-tier pages reuse a small set of phrases, and each one has a translation:
| What you read | What it usually means |
|---|---|
| "Free for individual use" | Teams and commercial use are a paid tier |
| "Generous limits" | The limits aren't published — you'll discover them during your busiest hour |
| "Rate-limited free access" | A trial with no end date but a ceiling that can move quietly |
| "Free during beta" | Priced at launch; the launch date is findable |
| "Unlimited*" | Read the asterisk — it's a fair-use clause |
| "Free tier" (no numbers) | The number is dynamic |
The trustworthy version reads boringly: specific numbers, a reset period, what happens on overflow — hard stop, throttle, or surprise invoice. Numbers for paid tiers but adjectives for the free one? Treat the free tier as undocumented.
3. Look at the pricing page's history
Vendors rarely announce deprecations loudly. They edit pages. Two minutes of archaeology:
- Plug the pricing URL into the Wayback Machine.
- Compare snapshots from six and twelve months ago.
- Look for removed free-tier rows, added seat minimums, "free" quietly becoming "trial," and quota numbers that shrank without a changelog entry.
This cuts both ways, by the way. It also shows you which vendors have kept their free tier stable for years — the strongest evidence available that "forever" might mean it.
For open-source projects, swap the Wayback Machine for the repo: is there a commercial entity behind it, and do recent commits touch licensing or cloud terms?
4. Test the ceiling before the ceiling tests you
The only honest way to learn a free tier's boundary is to find it deliberately:
- Push it in bulk. Run a batch job or a deliberately long context and watch where the throttling starts — requests per minute, tokens per day, concurrent sessions.
- Let it sit. Park the account for two weeks, then log back in. Free tiers get pruned, and so do idle keys.
- Check the exit. Confirm you can get your data out — a full export, an API dump, or at least a documented format. A free tier you can't leave is a hostage situation with good UX.
Write down what you find, with dates. Future-you, reading a price-increase email, will want that note.
The trick behind all four steps
Every step does the same thing: turns a claim into a record. "Free forever" can't be verified directly — it's marketing language. Specific numbers, licence files, archived snapshots, and your own test logs can be.
Comparison sites are useful exactly to the extent that they do this work for you — quoting the vendor's own limits, dating the record, saying what they didn't check. If a directory lists a tool with no pricing detail and no freshness date, it hasn't verified the claim either. It has just passed it along.
That verification work is most of what we do at Oryxen. Our guide to evaluating documented free AI access walks through eligibility, quota, and limits step by step — and every record in the tool index carries a source and a re-check date, so you can see how fresh the claim in front of you actually is.i
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