If I had absolutely no money, I’d use these free AI.

List of the best free AI tools in 2026:

I spend (at least) $1,000 per month on AI.

But what if I had zero money?

I tried the free tier of hundreds of AIs to answer the question.

Before you start, take a second to share this newsletter with anyone who’s struggling to pay for AI.

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#1. The best free chatbot.

ChatGPT:

ChatGPT is still the #1 free AI.

I need the best chatbot to do three things well.

1. It must be smart enough.

2. It must have very few limits.

3. It must have enough useful features.

First, for the smartest, I like to use this Intelligence Index:

I do think Fable-5 is smarter than Opus-5. But it’s still a good indicator.

Now the problem is that most of these models are not available for free.

If you only focus on the free ones, the list is very small:

1. Claude Opus & Fable are only part of the paid plan.

2. Claude free model is Sonnet 5, and it’s not a good model.

3. Gemini free model is 3.6-Flash, far from the top 20 models.

4. Grok is great, but not free. Keep an eye on it for the future.

5. The Chinese ones (Kimi, DeepSeek, Qwen) are cheap if you use them to code (you pay per token). But I want the option of having no money at all.

That’s why ChatGPT is the best for a 100% free account.

But especially if you use ChatGPT like this:

1. You must download the app. I believe every LLM is better on its native app (vs. the browser). They optimize everything for it: connectors, skills, models…

2. Inside the app, go to “ChatGPT Work” and choose the model “5.6-Terra-High”.

3. Once you've tapped out Terra, you can always use the smaller model, Luna, in High settings. I believe this one is free forever without limits.

But how does it compare to the paid Claude?

Actually, very good.

I needed to build a quick spreadsheet for a client, and made this prompt:

I sell software for $170/year.

I pay a team $50,000 per month, and I want to give them 20% of the revenue (shared across the team). I also spend ads, so far very little ($1000/day), and I only have to spend $50 to sell a $170/year software. The churn is about 70% after year 1, and 30% from year 1 to year 2.

How much money I can scale and spend on ads, while still giving bonuses to my team, and being able to pay myself a salary of $50,000/mo.

If you click on Plugins, you can select Spreadsheets, and ChatGPT will do much better ones. You even have some templates you can preselect:

Once you made your prompt, you can select a Plugin, like Spreadsheets.

Then ChatGPT will think through your issue for a while.

And it built up these 4 spreadsheet tabs. I wanted to open it inside Google Sheets, but you have to pay ChatGPT for it…

That’s the error message. It shows you what you could have for quicker access.

So I simply manually imported the spreadsheet to Google Sheets. Not a big deal.

Pro tip: you can have another free ChatGPT inside your Google Sheets as an Extension.

And you can connect many apps, for free, inside ChatGPT.

Just follow these steps:

Left menu → Plugins → Search for the one you want.

Here, for example, with Gamma.

So ChatGPT is the best chatbot for free. It is connected to most apps and has an excellent free model (Terra-High in Work, or Luna-High always free).

And a bonus: you can also make images:

This is the cover of this newsletter, made with the free ChatGPT.

Chatbot is 99% of your AI needs.

But what about the rest?

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#2. The best free [task].

ChatGPT covers most of your (free) needs.

But here’s a quick list of the rest:

1. Gamma for slides: 400 starter AI credits, but they do not refill. You can create AI presentations, use built-in themes, publish/share on web and export. You can earn more credits via referrals.

2. Wispr Flow for dictation: Desktop: 2,000 words/week soft cap, 5,000 hard cap. iOS: 1,000 soft / 1,500 hard. Dictation works across apps, 100+ languages, Mac/Windows/iOS/Android. Caps reset weekly.

3. Shortcut AI for Excel: if your life is to make Excel (otherwise ChatGPT free is more than enough). 20 AI credits/week, recurring. Includes web + desktop app + Excel and Google Sheets plugins.

4. Seedance for videos: Dreamina gives free daily credits and access to Seedance (the best AI model for videos). Currently 225 free credits/tokens per day, resetting daily.

5. Google Vids for videos: another good one, although I prefer Seedance/Dreamina. Anyone with a Google account gets 10 Veo 3.1 video generations/month.

6. Grammarly for grammar fixes: Unlimited basic spelling/grammar correction, but they are very (very) annoying with the pop-up to make you pay.

7. NotebookLM for learning: One of the strongest free tools for research over your own sources, with notebooks, source-grounded chat, and tons of other stuff. I think the new name is Gemini Notebook, though.

8. Cursor for coding: it’s a bit weird to code for free, and ChatGPT Codex is already good too, but Cursor has a hobby plan: free, no card, with limited Agent requests + limited Tab completions.

9. ElevenLabs for text-to-speech: Free text-to-speech/voice AI. One of the obvious category leaders. Obviously the free plan is limited.

10. Granola for meeting notes: Free meeting-notes tier. Particularly good if you want an invisible meeting bot. I prefer.

11. Canva for designs: Huge permanent free design product. Some AI/Magic Studio capabilities are available for free but heavily limited.

And if you are vibecoding with ChatGPT Codex (or Cursor), here’s my favorite combo, free until you start hitting some volume limits:

1. Vercel: So that your website is on the internet, deployed for free.

2. GitHub: So that the code of your website/project is stored somewhere.

3. Supabase: So that your website has a sign-in option (so imagine you want to have a unique experience per user; there is a login option).

4. Resend: So that you can send instructions by email to people who connect to your website (works well with logins, for example). 3,000 transactional emails/month for free.

I very often start to vibecode anything by saying:

You are already connected to my Github, Vercel, Supabase & Resend.

I want to build [project] for [goal + success criteria].

Make sure that [rules, max 3]. Ask me clarifying questions first.

This was the list of the best AI tools for free.

Now here’s how much I pay for AI, and for which tools: