"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.
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