Of the 48 AI tools Yuzoki tracks, 29 give you a free allowance that renews, and only 18 of those tell you exactly how much you get. Another 10 give you nothing that comes back: either a one-time pile of credits, a trial, or no free plan at all. A list of "free" tools rarely makes this distinction, so a tool that looks free can turn out to be a one-off trial.
The answer in one table
Every free plan falls into one of five groups. The first two are the ones you can build a habit on, because the allowance comes back.
| Group | Tools | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| Renews, amount published | 18 | You know what you get and when it resets |
| Renews, amount not published | 11 | It resets, but you find the limit by hitting it |
| Free, no stated limit or reset | 8 | Free to use, with no published allowance |
| One-time credits or trial only | 6 | Good for testing, gone once used |
| No free allowance | 4 | You pay from the first generation |
| Could not check | 1 | Doubao, region-restricted outside China |
The 18 free plans that renew and say how much
These are the free plans you can plan a week around, because the amount and the reset are both written down. The numbers below are copied from each maker's pricing page. We counted "unlimited" as a published amount, which is why ChatGPT, Elicit and Fireflies appear here.
| Tool | Free allowance | Resets |
|---|---|---|
| ChatGPT | Unlimited text chats with GPT-6, subject to abuse guardrails; uploads, images and deep research limited | Ongoing |
| Elicit | Unlimited search across more than 138 million papers; Research Agent limited | Ongoing |
| Fireflies | Unlimited transcription, 400 minutes of storage per team, 20 AI credits | Ongoing |
| GitHub Copilot | 2,000 completions | Monthly |
| Zapier | 100 tasks | Monthly |
| Make | 1,000 credits | Monthly |
| DeepL | 50,000 characters, 1 file translation | Monthly |
| ElevenLabs | 10,000 credits | Monthly |
| Otter | 300 transcription minutes, 30 minutes per conversation | Monthly |
| Grammarly | 100 AI prompts | Monthly |
| HeyGen | 3 videos of up to 1 minute, watermarked | Monthly |
| Synthesia | 10 minutes of video and 500 credits | Monthly |
| Descript | 60 media minutes (its 100 AI credits are one-time) | Monthly |
| Bolt | 1M tokens, with a 300K daily cap | Monthly |
| Figma | 150 AI credits a day, up to 500 a month | Daily |
| Lovable | 5 build credits a day, up to 30 a month | Daily |
| Suno | 50 credits | Daily |
| v0 | 7 messages | Daily |
Most tools in this group charge by usage (automation, voice, transcription, video and app building), and their paid plans are sold in the same units as the free allowance: tasks, credits, minutes or tokens. Among the big chat assistants, ChatGPT is the only one whose pricing page promises unlimited free text chat, subject to abuse guardrails. Uploads, images and deep research stay limited.
The 11 that renew but keep the number to themselves
Several of the most used assistants sit here. Claude says its free plan has "limited usage every 5 hours and every week". Gemini says your limit "refreshes every 5 hours until you reach your weekly limit", and its help page says limits factor in how complex your prompt is. Grok and Cursor now sell one subscription with a usage pool shared across both, and the allowance refreshes weekly. Adobe Firefly refreshes daily, Canva gives a monthly AI allowance that "varies by plan", and Kling gives non-subscribers monthly free credits that last 31 days. Ideogram gives weekly credits to accounts that sign in with Google, Apple or Microsoft and now says "the amount may vary". Replit documents daily Agent credits up to a monthly cap, and Gemini Notebook uses compute-based limits on top of 100 notebooks and 50 sources per notebook.
Perplexity is the odd one: its pricing card says the free plan is "good for limited daily usage", while the FAQ on the same page says "limited weekly usage". Google and Anthropic both say the limit depends on what you do: the model, the length of the chat and, for Claude, the size of your files. A short question uses less than a long research task. The cost for you is that you cannot know in advance whether a free plan will last through a working afternoon.
The 18 that are not what they seem
Eight tools are free to use with no published allowance or reset at all: Microsoft Copilot ("subject to available capacity and limits"), Vibe from Mistral, Meta AI, DeepSeek, Kimi, Qwen, GLM on Z.ai and ERNIE. We did not measure how far these plans go, and none of the makers commits to a number in writing.
Six give you a one-time amount or a trial. Gamma gives 400 credits at signup, while its paid plans get monthly credits. Runway gives 125 one-time credits that do not expire. Hailuo gives new users free credits. n8n cloud is a trial of 1,000 executions and 800 credits that expire when the trial ends, though the self-hosted edition is free. Notion offers a limited trial of its AI on the free plan, and Cohere offers only a rate-limited trial API key that cannot be used commercially.
Four have no free allowance. Midjourney starts at $10 a month, Luma lists no free plan above its $30 Plus plan, FLUX is pay as you go (its open models can be downloaded and run yourself), and Pika lets you create a free account with 0 credits a month, so you buy packs.
What it means for your role
If you run marketing, plan recurring work on the tools in the first group. A weekly social video on HeyGen's 3 free videos a month, or voiceovers inside ElevenLabs' 10,000 monthly credits, comes back every month. Gamma's 400 signup credits are fine for one deck and a poor base for a weekly report.
If you are a founder or run operations, treat Zapier's 100 tasks and Make's 1,000 credits a month as a test budget. Count how many runs one automation uses in a normal week before you build three more on a free plan.
If you manage a team's tools, do not standardise on a free plan from the second or third group. When a limit is not published, two colleagues on the same plan can hit it at different times, and you cannot write a fair policy around a number you do not know.
If you are a student or learning on your own, combine renewing plans. Use ChatGPT's unlimited text chat, Elicit's unlimited paper search and Claude or Gemini on their 5-hour resets side by side, so that hitting one limit does not stop your work.
We think a free plan that renews and publishes its number is worth more than a bigger one-time grant, because you can plan real work around it, and every AI maker with a free plan should publish its allowance. We will rerun this check so you can see who does.
How to check a free plan in two minutes
- Open the maker's own pricing page, not a list article, and find the free column.
- Look for a period next to the number: "a day", "a month", "every 5 hours". "At signup" or "one-time" means it does not come back.
- If there is no number, search the page's FAQ for "limit" or "refresh". If you still find nothing, expect to discover the limit by hitting it.
- Check what the free plan excludes. HeyGen's free videos carry a watermark, and Cohere's trial key may not be used commercially.
- For a full list of free options by task, see our best free AI tools guide and our free ChatGPT alternatives.