The Julius AI free plan: what the free credits actually get you

If you are searching for the Julius AI free plan, you are almost certainly asking one question: can I actually get my work done without paying? Here is the line that settles it before any credit arithmetic: the free plan has no database connector at all. Its Free column lists Google Drive, OneDrive and Sharepoint; Snowflake, BigQuery and Postgres begin on Plus at $20/mo. So if the numbers you need to ask about live in a database, the size of the free credit grant never enters into it. If they live in files, the credits are then the whole question — and the honest answer on those, from Julius's own documentation, is that the free plan is not a plan you live on. It is a small allowance meant for an evaluation rather than for ongoing work. Whether it runs out permanently or refills at a low daily rate is one of the things Julius does not say consistently, which is the next section — but under either reading it is an allowance you finish, not one you work inside.

One thing to settle before you spend ten minutes here, because it disqualifies a lot of readers immediately. If the data you work on arrives as files — a spreadsheet a client emailed you — then Julius's free plan opens it and the Intellrise free tier cannot, at any tier below Pro. That is the single biggest difference between the two free plans and it is not close. This page is written for the case where the data you need to ask questions about sits in a database. If your work starts with a file on your laptop and you need it to stay free permanently, the honest answer is Julius. One fact before you decide, because it is the one most likely to change the answer: every new Intellrise account starts on 14 days of Pro with no card, and file upload is part of Pro. So a file is free to test here — what Julius does and we do not is keep it free after that.

How small, exactly, is the part nobody can tell you from the outside — including us. Julius's billing documentation described the Free grant as "100 (one-time)" credits that "don't renew" when we read it on 3 August 2026; by 28 August 2026 that same table said "25 welcome bonus + 25 daily credits" instead, and the figure of 100 survived only in the FAQ lower down the page; the pricing page's comparison table describes the Free column only as "Free daily credits" and gives no number anywhere. We quote all three below with the dates we read them. We are not going to pick one for you and present it as settled, because we cannot see your account — but every version agrees the allowance is small and that a live database is not part of it, and those two facts are usually what the decision turns on.

This guide covers what the free plan includes, the three limits that catch people out, where Julius's own pages disagree with each other, and where Julius's free plan is genuinely the better choice than ours. Every Julius figure below was read from a Julius-owned page — on 3, 13 and 28 August and again on 6 September 2026 — and each one carries the date we read it. If you want the full cost breakdown across all the paid tiers instead, read our Julius AI pricing guide.

If what you actually want is a plan you can work inside rather than an allowance you finish, that is a fortnight of ordinary work away from being settled either way.

Start free — 14 days of Pro, no card

First, the question that decides whether any of this applies to you: can we reach your database?

Intellrise connects from our servers, not from your browser, so your database has to accept a connection from the internet, and the account you give us has to be read-only. That second one stays your control, not ours — and when you connect we check whether you used one: Intellrise asks your database what that account is allowed to do and puts the answer on the connection screen. It reports, it never blocks, and it says so plainly when it cannot tell. On our side we also refuse the statements we send. Three sources skip that question entirely: BigQuery, Google Sheets and uploaded CSV or Excel files need no inbound rule at all, because there is no port to open. If you do open one, the page below has the checklist, the copy-paste GRANT statements for four databases, the two outbound ranges we connect from, and the TLS position per database type: Postgres always connects with sslmode=require and there is no setting to turn it off, while MySQL, SQL Server and Redshift follow whatever your server negotiates.

Can Intellrise connect to my database?

The other prerequisite is an AI provider key of your own, on every plan including the trial. A Google Gemini key is free and takes about a minute:

How do I get a free AI key?

The short answer

• The free plan costs $0, and the size of the grant depends on which Julius page you read. Its billing FAQ says free users "receive a one-time grant of 100 credits when they sign up; these credits don't renew"; the credits table on that same page said "25 welcome bonus + 25 daily credits" when we re-read it on 13 August 2026, and still said it on 28 August 2026. Both are quoted in full further down.
• Credits do not roll over and cannot be topped up. Asked whether unused credits roll over, Julius answers "No. Unused credits expire at the end of your billing cycle and don't carry over." On buying more: "At the moment, purchasing additional credits or topping up your balance is not supported."
• There is no free trial of the paid tiers. The words "trial", "free trial" and "credit card" do not appear anywhere on the Julius pricing page — we checked the rendered page and the underlying data payload. The free plan is the trial.
• You cannot connect a database on Free. The pricing comparison table's Data connectors row lists "Google Drive, OneDrive, Sharepoint" for Free; Snowflake, BigQuery and Postgres appear only from Plus upward.
• Four of the headline features are "Limited" on Free rather than included. Reading the pricing comparison table on 6 September 2026, the Free column says "Limited" for AI Presentation Maker, AI Image Generator, AI Video Generator and Build Websites with AI, while all four carry a tick in every paid column; Scheduled Runs is not offered on Free or Plus at all and starts at 3 on Pro. Julius does not publish what "Limited" amounts to, so it is one more thing you can only size by spending the grant.
• Uploaded files are deleted after an hour of inactivity. Julius's file documentation is explicit: free-tier files are "retained for up to 1 hour of inactivity, after which all uploaded and AI-generated files are deleted". Paid users get 7 days.
• Julius no longer counts messages at all. If you have read an older comparison quoting a monthly message cap for Julius, it is out of date — the docs now say "Instead of counting messages, Julius now measures usage in credits."

Where Julius's own pages disagree about the free plan

This is the part worth reading slowly, because it is the reason the free plan is hard to research. Julius maintains a marketing pricing page and a separate documentation site, and the table below puts the same five questions to both. When we first ran it on 3 August 2026, four of the five came back with two different answers. When we ran it again on 28 August 2026, two of those four had been reconciled, one had changed its numbers on us, and one was unchanged. We are not claiming either page is dishonest — docs and marketing pages drift apart at every company, including ours. But if you are deciding whether the free plan is enough for you, you should know which number you are trusting, and you should know how fast that answer moves.

Run the same audit on us, because it is the only reason to believe the rest of this page. Every Intellrise figure here comes from one place — our own pricing page and the product itself — and if you find two Intellrise pages disagreeing about a limit, that is a bug rather than a positioning decision, and telling us is enough to get it fixed.

Question	julius.ai/pricing says	Julius docs say
How many free credits?	The Credits row for Free still reads "Free daily credits" with no number given anywhere on the page (28 August 2026)	Two answers on one page (28 August 2026): the credits table now reads "25 welcome bonus + 25 daily credits" and the prose beneath it "The Free plan's 25 welcome bonus credits are a one-time grant and don't renew", while the FAQ further down still says free users "receive a one-time grant of 100 credits when they sign up". On 3 August that table row read "Free — 100 (one-time)"; it does not any more
Do they recur?	"daily" implies a recurring allowance; "Daily refresh credits" is separately listed as a feature of the paid cards only	They do not recur. "these credits don't renew"
How much memory?	Nothing at all: RAM, GB and sandbox return zero matches across the whole page (28 August 2026). On 3 August the Free card and a System memory row read "2 GB of RAM"; that row has left the page	Unchanged and now the only published figure: the Standard container is "8 GB" and is marked "All plans", with "Memory Boost" at "32 GB" on "Pro plan and higher" (julius.ai/docs/get-started/containers, 28 August 2026)
Which models on Free?	No longer a disagreement, and we are saying so: on 28 August 2026 the Models row reads "Julius Lite models" for Free, "Julius models, GPT-5.6, Claude Sonnet 5" for Plus and "All models, including Claude Fable 5" from Pro up. On 3 August it showed Free as identical to Plus	"Julius 1.2 Lite" is "All plans"; every other model listed is "Paid plans" or higher (28 August 2026). The two pages now agree — Julius fixed this one between our reads, and leaving the old accusation up would have been the easy thing to do
What is the metering unit?	The word "message" still does not appear on the pricing page at all (0 matches, 28 August 2026)	"Instead of counting messages, Julius now measures usage in credits"

The three limits that actually decide it

Credit counts are the headline, but in practice three other constraints determine whether the free plan can do your job.

• No live data connection. The free plan reads files from Google Drive, OneDrive and Sharepoint. If your data lives in Postgres, MySQL, Snowflake or BigQuery, the free plan cannot reach it — that capability starts on Plus at $20/mo ($16/mo billed yearly). For anyone evaluating an AI analyst against a real warehouse, this is usually the deciding line rather than the credit count.
• Files vanish after an hour idle. Because free-tier files are deleted after an hour of inactivity, the free plan does not support coming back to yesterday's analysis. It supports one sitting. That is a reasonable design for a trial and a poor one for recurring reporting.
• The grant is small, and you cannot price it in advance. On the one-time reading there is no steady state at all; on the 25-a-day reading there is one, but it is a low daily ceiling rather than a budget you can save up, because credits do not roll over and cannot be topped up. Either way Julius does not publish a per-action credit price — its FAQ says directly that there is "no single answer" because cost depends on the message complexity and which tools are invoked — so you cannot convert the grant into a number of questions in advance. You find out by spending it. One wrinkle before you plan on buying your way out: the same billing page that says top-ups are not supported also carries a refund clause governing them, word for word — "Credits are non-refundable, whether you bought them as a top-up or received them through your subscription" (julius.ai/docs/billing/credits-overview, read 28 August 2026). The ordinary explanation is that refund policies are drafted to cover more than a product currently ships, and we are not going to call it anything worse than that. It does mean the page cannot tell you whether top-ups are coming back, so if your plan for running dry is "buy a few more", ask a human at Julius first. On the Intellrise free tier there is no grant to top up and nothing to run out of on our side: you attach your own AI provider key and pay that provider directly, so the ceiling is your own billing account rather than ours.

What $0 buys on the Intellrise side

The question that brought you here is whether free is enough to do your work, and you cannot answer it by reading one vendor's free column. So here is the same accounting for the Intellrise free tier, at the same level of detail, with the places it loses set out in the section after next rather than buried.

One note on how to read what follows, because the standard of proof is not the same on both sides. Every Julius figure on this page carries a URL and the date we read it, so you can check it yourself in a minute. The Intellrise claims below come from our own source code, which you cannot read — so treat them as things to verify rather than things to believe, and the fastest verification is a free account, which needs no card. Where a claim is about quality rather than mechanism we have said so and declined to make it.

One framing note before the list, because it decides which of these two is even relevant to you. Julius's free plan is built around files: you bring a spreadsheet, it reads it, and the meter counts what you spend. The Intellrise free tier is built around a connection: you point it at a database and supply your own AI key, and there is no meter. Neither shape is better in the abstract. They are better for different starting positions, and the starting position is where your data already lives.

• One live database, and it can be a real one. The Intellrise free tier connects a single data source, and that source may be PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQL Server, BigQuery, Snowflake, Databricks or Redshift. Google Sheets is not counted against that one at all, and not as a second slot either: Intellrise excludes Sheets from the source quota entirely, with no separate cap on how many you connect. So a database plus however many Sheets you need is a free-tier configuration, and this is the one route by which mixed work — a client who gives you database access and two who email you spreadsheets — fits on $0, provided you are willing to land the spreadsheets in Sheets rather than upload the files. This is the line the two products draw in different places: Julius gates live database connectors at Plus, $20/mo, while on Intellrise the connection is the thing the free tier is for.
• No credit meter, because there is nothing to meter. Intellrise does not resell model capacity — you supply your own provider key and pay that provider directly at their list price — so there is no allowance to run down, no top-up to buy and no counter in the corner of the screen. The usage endpoint in the product returns no limit at all rather than a number you are counting down from. Your ceiling is whatever your own AI account allows, which also means you pick the model and therefore the rate.
• Every export format, on the free tier. CSV, Excel, PDF, PowerPoint and Word. The export route carries no plan check at all, so a free Intellrise account produces the same files a paying one does. For a lot of freelance and consulting work the deliverable is the whole job, and this is the limit that usually bites first elsewhere. Two caveats we would rather you read here than discover later: the document formats truncate long tables — PDF and PowerPoint show the first 30 rows and Word the first 100, with a line telling the reader how many were left off, while CSV and Excel carry everything — and the free tier has no share links and no email delivery, so getting the file to someone else is your job, not the product's.
• AI report editing is on the free tier. Asking the assistant to rewrite a section of a generated report is guarded by a feature flag that is switched on for every tier, free included — it is the one piece of AI-assisted authoring in Intellrise that costs nothing beyond your own tokens.
• No trial cliff, because the free tier is not a trial. An Intellrise free account does not expire, does not ask for a card and does not convert into anything at the end of a period. The fourteen-day Pro trial sits alongside it rather than replacing it: decline the trial and you are on the same Intellrise free tier you started on, with the same one live database and the same exports. That matters here because what you are really comparing is not two free plans but two evaluation paths — one where the allowance runs out and one where it does not. On Intellrise, outgrowing free is a decision you make, not a balance hitting zero.
• Schema reading is not sampled down. Intellrise walks every table and every column the connection exposes rather than taking the first N, so a wide database does not get silently truncated on the way in. Being straight about what "exposes" covers, because until 23 August 2026 it covered less than that sentence implies: on PostgreSQL we read ordinary tables, partitioned parents, views and materialized views — but views and materialized views were invisible before that date, so if your reporting logic lived in a view, the model did not tell you it could not see it, it answered from the base tables instead. That is fixed and this is what it now reads. Two things it still does not read, both on Redshift: materialized views, and late-binding views, whose columns cannot be resolved until query time — we leave those out rather than hand the model a table name with no columns under it, because that is how you get invented column names. And all of this describes what the code does, not a published benchmark on somebody else's forty-table production schema. We have not run that benchmark in public, so do not take this as a promise about answer quality on a messy database — take it as the absence of an artificial cap.
• Three dashboards, and reports are not rationed by the month. The free tier caps dashboards at three; it does not put a monthly ceiling on how many questions you ask or reports you generate, because there is no unit to ration.

What the free plan does include

It is a genuinely capable free tier for the file-first use case, and it is worth being precise about that rather than dismissive. On 28 August 2026 the Free card lists exactly three key features, quoted verbatim: "Create presentations, reports, websites, images, and video", "File storage formats" (tooltip: "Upload .csv, .xlsx, .sav"), and "Google Drive data connector". That is a different card from the one we quoted here on 3 August 2026, which listed "Access to Notebooks" and "2 GB of RAM": on 28 August 2026 the strings Notebooks, RAM and 2 GB return zero matches anywhere on that page, and Julius's own documentation now says, word for word, "Notebooks have been sunset" (julius.ai/docs/notebooks-sunset, read 28 August 2026). We are showing you both readings rather than quietly swapping one for the other, because the change is the point: the free tier you evaluated in July is not the free tier you would sign up for today, and Julius's pricing page carries no date of its own to warn you.

What has not changed is the limit on our side. Intellrise does not run arbitrary Python or R at any price — analysis here is read-only SQL — and the sunset of Julius's Notebooks does not narrow that gap, because the code execution underneath it is still there: Julius's own docs describe it "running code, querying data" as it works, and its visualization page names matplotlib, seaborn and plotly (read 28 August 2026). If your work needs a statistical library, that is a reason to use Julius rather than us. And .sav is SPSS, which matters if you are coming from academic or survey research; Intellrise does not read that format either.

The other shape of free: bring your own key

Intellrise's free tier is built on a different model, and the difference is worth understanding before you compare the two, because it changes what "free" means rather than just how much of it you get.

There is no credit meter on any Intellrise plan, free or paid. You supply your own AI provider key — Gemini, OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepSeek, MiniMax or any OpenAI-compatible endpoint — and you pay that provider directly for tokens at their list price. We do not resell model capacity, so there is nothing for us to ration. Your ceiling is whatever your own provider account allows, and you choose the model, which is the single biggest lever on cost.

The free tier connects one data source, and that source can be a live database: PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQL Server, BigQuery, Snowflake, Databricks or Redshift, plus Google Sheets which does not count against the one. That is the main practical difference from Julius's free plan — a live warehouse connection is the thing Julius gates and we do not.

On the free plan	Julius	Intellrise
Recurring allowance	A small grant Julius's own pages size differently — "100 (one-time)" in one place, "25 welcome bonus + 25 daily" in another; no rollover, no top-up either way	No credit meter. You pay your own AI provider directly for tokens
Live database connection	Not included. Data connectors row lists Google Drive, OneDrive, Sharepoint; Snowflake, BigQuery and Postgres start on Plus	One data source, which can be PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQL Server, BigQuery, Snowflake, Databricks or Redshift — plus Google Sheets, uncounted
File upload	Included: .csv, .xlsx, .sav	Not on Free. File upload (CSV/Excel) is listed on Pro
File retention	Deleted after 1 hour of inactivity (paid: 7 days)	Not applicable — the free tier reads a live connected source rather than storing uploads
Notebooks	Sunset. Julius's docs say "Notebooks have been sunset" (read 28 August 2026) and the Free card no longer lists them; the code execution underneath continues	Not offered on any plan
Models	Docs mark only Julius 1.2 Lite as available on all plans; frontier models are marked paid	Any model your own key can reach, including frontier models, on the free tier
Trial of the paid tier	None offered; "trial" does not appear on the pricing page	14-day Pro trial, no card. The free tier remains after it lapses

Getting a key is the annoying step and we are not going to dress it up: you go to Google AI Studio, create a free Gemini key, and paste it in. It took us about a minute; it will feel like a detour. Everything after it is free to try, because a new account also starts on 14 days of Pro.

Start your 14-day Pro trial

14 days of Pro, no credit card. After it lapses the free tier stays free.

Where Julius's free plan is the better choice

We would rather you pick the right tool than pick ours, so here is the honest version. If any of these describe you, Julius's free plan will serve you better than the Intellrise one will, and you should take it.

• Your data is a spreadsheet on your laptop. Julius's free plan accepts .csv, .xlsx and .sav uploads. The Intellrise free tier does not — file upload sits on Intellrise Pro, so a free Intellrise account cannot open your file at all.
• You want to ask a question in the next five minutes. Julius runs on its own platform key, so you sign up and type. Every Intellrise plan is bring-your-own-key with no platform fallback, which means you must go and create a key with an AI provider before you can ask a single question. That is real friction and we are not going to pretend otherwise.
• You want to run Python or R. The code execution did not leave with the notebooks, and the docs are explicit about it: julius.ai/docs/get-started/tools says "Julius writes Python or R and runs it in a secure cloud container", and its visualization page names matplotlib, seaborn and plotly (both read 28 August 2026). Intellrise runs read-only SQL and has no code execution at any price. One correction to an earlier version of this page: if it was specifically the cell-based notebook you wanted, neither tool has one for you now — julius.ai/docs/notebooks-sunset says "Notebooks have been sunset" (read 28 August 2026).
• You work in SPSS. Julius reads .sav. Intellrise reads CSV and Excel.
• You need it for one afternoon. A grant this size is a perfectly good fit for a single evaluation sitting, which is what it is designed for. The afternoon itself is covered on our side too — a new account's 14 days of Pro include file upload — so the honest difference is the step before it: you have to create an AI provider key here before you can ask anything, and Julius runs on its own.
• Your data is a file, not a database. This is the whole ballgame. Julius Free reads .csv, .xlsx and .sav from Drive, OneDrive and SharePoint; the Intellrise free tier cannot accept an uploaded file on any plan below Pro. If your work starts with a spreadsheet somebody emailed you, Julius Free keeps doing it for nothing and our free tier never does — the 14 days of Pro that open your file first are the paid tier, not this one.

If the file is in your hand right now, Julius's free plan is the faster route today. If the data lives in a database, that is the case worth testing here.

Connect a database, free for 14 days

14 days of Pro, no credit card. After it lapses the free tier stays free.

What the Intellrise free tier does not do

For symmetry, the limits on the Intellrise side, so you are not surprised after signing up.

• You must bring your own AI provider key. There is no platform key fallback on any tier, including paid ones. Without a key, the product cannot answer anything.
• Bring-your-own-key is not free. You pay your provider for tokens. It is charged at their list price with no markup from Intellrise and it is predictable and linear, but it is not zero, and at very low volume a vendor's included quota can genuinely be cheaper.
• One data source on Free, and three dashboards — and those three cannot be rearranged. Dashboard drag and resize, changing a chart's type or colours, and hand-editing the SQL behind a chart are all Pro. On the free tier a dashboard is what the product composed, not something you lay out.
• No share links and no email delivery on Free. You can export every format, but distributing it is outside the product.
• Unlimited data sources — the count never enters the price — plus file upload, dashboard customisation, share links, email delivery and the AI semantic layer are on Intellrise Pro, $29/mo, with a lower effective rate if you pay annually.
• No file upload on Free, no notebooks at any tier, no .sav support, no Slack agent, and no public API.
• The Team plan is not shipped yet — it is listed as coming, not available.

Those are the limits of the free plan. The 14 days of Pro that come first are the paid tier, not this one — and there is no card to cancel when they lapse.

Try Pro for 14 days, no card

14 days of Pro, no credit card. After it lapses the free tier stays free.

The one test worth running before you trust either of them

Neither this page nor any comparison page — ours included — can tell you the thing that actually decides this: whether the tool reads your particular schema correctly. The failure that costs you is not a missing feature. It is a column whose meaning is not in its name — a status integer where 3 means refunded rather than complete — being read the obvious way, and quietly producing a number you then send to somebody.

So run that test before you run any other. On whichever free tier fits where your data lives, connect or upload, ask one question that depends on your most misleading column, and check the answer against a number you already know is right. The Intellrise answer to that risk is not a claim, it is that the test is cheap: on the Intellrise free tier it costs one database connection and about twenty minutes. We are not going to tell you we pass it on your schema, because we have not seen your schema — but if Intellrise gets that column wrong, you have found out for free, on a number you could already check, rather than after you had sent it to your CEO.

Frequently asked questions

Is Julius AI free?

There is a free plan at $0. What is genuinely hard to answer is how much of it you get, because Julius publishes more than one figure. On 28 August 2026 its billing documentation gives two figures on one page: the credits table says "25 welcome bonus + 25 daily credits" and the prose under it "The Free plan's 25 welcome bonus credits are a one-time grant and don't renew", while the FAQ lower down says free users "receive a one-time grant of 100 credits when they sign up". The pricing page's comparison table says only "Free daily credits", with no number at all. On 3 August that table row read "100 (one-time)" instead, so the number has moved as well as being disputed. What every version agrees on is the shape: the free allowance is small, and continuing past it means a paid plan. Read from julius.ai on 3, 13 and 28 August 2026.

How many free credits does Julius give you, and do they renew?

Julius's own pages give two answers, so the honest reply is that you should count your own. Its credits documentation says free users "receive a one-time grant of 100 credits when they sign up; these credits don't renew", while the credits table on that same page read "25 welcome bonus + 25 daily credits" on 13 August 2026. Whichever you are granted, they do not roll over — asked directly whether unused credits roll over, Julius answers "No. Unused credits expire at the end of your billing cycle and don't carry over." And they cannot be extended by purchase: "At the moment, purchasing additional credits or topping up your balance is not supported." So the free plan has one budget with no refill mechanism of any kind.

How many questions do the free credits get you?

Julius does not publish a per-action credit price, and says so explicitly — its billing FAQ answers that there is no single answer because the cost depends on the complexity of the message and which tools it invokes. A quick question costs far less than a multi-step analysis that pulls data, runs code and produces a deliverable. Julius names model choice as one of the biggest drivers, with its faster in-house models consuming credits far more slowly than frontier ones. The only way to know your own rate is to watch the Usage page as you spend.

Can you connect a database on the Julius free plan?

No. On the pricing page's comparison table, the Data connectors row shows "Google Drive, OneDrive, Sharepoint" for the Free column, while Plus, Pro and Business add Snowflake, BigQuery and Postgres. So the free plan reads files from cloud storage, not live databases. Julius's own connector documentation lists PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQL Server, Snowflake, BigQuery, Databricks, Supabase and Vertica but does not state a plan requirement on those pages — the pricing table is the only Julius source that addresses the gating, so that is what we are citing. Read 3 August 2026 and re-read 28 August 2026, unchanged.

Does Julius AI have a free trial of its paid plans?

Not one that it advertises on its pricing page. We searched the rendered page and the underlying data payload on 3 August 2026 and again on 28 August 2026: the strings "trial", "free trial" and "credit card" return zero occurrences both times. The free plan itself is the evaluation path. For comparison, Intellrise offers a 14-day Pro trial with no card, and the account drops to the free tier afterwards rather than expiring.

What happens to your files on the Julius free plan?

They are deleted after an hour of inactivity. Julius's file documentation states that for free-tier users, files "are retained for up to 1 hour of inactivity, after which all uploaded and AI-generated files are deleted", while paid users keep files for up to 7 days of inactivity. Separately, the docs note that all containers, free and paid, spin down after an hour of inactivity. In practice this means the free plan supports a single working session rather than an analysis you return to.

Which AI models can you use on the Julius free plan?

One model, and the two Julius pages now agree on it. The model-selector documentation marks "Julius 1.2 Lite" as available on "All plans" and marks every other model — GPT-5.6 Sol, the Claude models, Grok and Kimi — as "Paid plans" or higher. The pricing page's comparison table matches: the Free column reads "Julius Lite models", Plus reads "Julius models, GPT-5.6, Claude Sonnet 5", and Pro and above read "All models, including Claude Fable 5". Both read 28 August 2026. We had a disagreement recorded here from 3 August, when the pricing table showed the Free column with the same model list as Plus; Julius has since fixed that, and we would rather say so than leave the old reading up. The docs page carries a caveat that plan availability can change and to check workspace settings, which is the safest advice we can pass on.

Does Julius still have a monthly message limit?

No, and this is the most common piece of stale information about Julius. Its documentation says plainly: "Instead of counting messages, Julius now measures usage in credits." Any comparison quoting a fixed number of messages per month on a Julius plan is describing a retired model. Julius's own site took a while to catch up, and we are updating this rather than leaving the old jab standing: on 3 August 2026 its service-description page was still describing Plus as providing "250 messages" and Pro as offering "unlimited messages", alongside a "Team plan at $50 per month per seat" that had already left the pricing page. When we re-read that page on 28 August 2026 it had been rewritten — the words message, messages and credits now return zero matches on it — so if you find a message count quoted anywhere about Julius today, it did not come from Julius.

Is there a free plan that connects to a live database?

Yes, and it is the main reason this comparison is worth reading rather than just checking Julius's pricing page. Julius gates live database connectors at Plus, $20/mo; the Intellrise free tier connects one live database at $0 — PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQL Server, BigQuery, Snowflake, Databricks or Redshift, with Google Sheets on top and not counted against the one. The trade is that Intellrise ships no platform AI key: you create a key with a provider such as Google, Anthropic or OpenAI, paste it in, and pay that provider for tokens directly at their price. If your data sits in a database and your budget is zero, that is usually the better trade. If your data is a spreadsheet on your laptop, it is the worse one, because a free Intellrise account cannot open an uploaded file at all — file upload is a Pro feature.

What does the Intellrise 14-day Pro trial include, and what happens after it?

A new account starts on Pro for 14 days with no card, so it includes the things the free tier does not: unlimited data sources instead of one, file upload, share links, email delivery of reports, and the AI semantic layer that learns what your columns mean and remembers it across sessions. When the 14 days lapse the account falls back to the permanently free tier rather than expiring or charging you, so there is nothing to cancel — which also means the honest way to use the trial is to spend it on the thing you cannot test for free, not on the thing you can.

What is the catch with a bring-your-own-key free tier?

That you have to bring a key. With Intellrise there is no credit meter and no per-question markup on any plan, so the free tier is not rationed the way a platform-key free tier has to be — but you must create an account with an AI provider and paste in a key before the product can answer anything, because there is no platform key fallback on any tier. You then pay that provider directly for tokens at list price. It is predictable and you control the model, but it is a slower start than signing up somewhere that includes the model, and at very low volume an included quota can cost you less.

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This is a canonical repost. The original lives at https://intellrise.com/guides/julius-ai-free/ and is the copy we keep updated — if a figure here has moved, the original is the one that will say so.