Blog

A year of reviewing tools for this site turned up a pattern that didn’t show up in any single review on its own, only across all of them together: free tiers are getting quietly worse, not better, at exactly the moment AI features are becoming the main selling point. That’s not a coincidence — it’s a direct trade-off, and understanding why it’s happening is more useful than being surprised by it one tool at a time.

The Evidence, Tool by Tool

Freshdesk used to offer an open-ended free plan supporting unlimited agents. In 2026, that became a Free Program capped at 1-2 agents for 6 months, after which it rolls into a paid tier automatically. Not a discount that expired — a structural downgrade of what “free” means on that platform.

Tidio’s free and entry plans include Lyro AI conversations — but only 50, total, ever, not monthly. The live chat portion of the product stays genuinely free; the AI portion was carved out and rationed from day one.

Even where a free tier is still holding up — Grammarly’s being the clearest example on this site — the boundary is a hard cap on AI prompts specifically (100 a month), while the older, non-AI grammar checking remains unlimited. The AI layer is consistently where the belt tightens first, across every tool that has one.

Why This Is Happening, Not Just That It Is

Running AI features costs money in a way that older SaaS features didn’t. A grammar check or a basic chatbot script is cheap to run at scale; a genuine AI model processing a request costs the company real money every single time, whether the user is on a free plan or not. Older software could subsidize a generous free tier because the marginal cost of one more free user was close to zero. AI features don’t work that way — every free AI interaction is a real, ongoing expense, not a one-time engineering cost spread across millions of users.

That’s the actual mechanism behind every example above. It’s not that these companies became less generous — it’s that “free” now has a direct, per-use cost attached to the exact feature everyone signed up for.

What This Means for How You Should Evaluate a Free Plan

The old assumption — free tier now roughly predicts free tier later — no longer holds for AI features specifically. Three practical adjustments follow from that:

Don’t build a core workflow entirely on a free AI allowance. If a chatbot, an AI assistant, or automated categorization becomes something your business depends on daily, plan for it to become a paid line item, because the free version of that specific feature is the most likely thing to shrink first.

Check whether a “free” number is monthly or total before relying on it. The pricing tricks breakdown on this site covers this in more depth, but it’s worth repeating here specifically: a one-time allowance disguised as an ongoing one is now common enough to check for by default, not just when something feels off.

Treat a generous free AI tier today as temporary, not a permanent feature of the product. None of the tools above shrank their free tier gradually — each change was a single, sharp cut applied at once. Budget with that possibility in mind rather than assuming today’s free plan is a stable foundation to build on indefinitely.

The Honest Counterpoint

None of this means free tiers are worthless or that these companies are acting in bad faith — running AI at scale genuinely costs money, and a company giving away unlimited AI usage for free either has a very short runway or a very large marketing budget subsidizing it. A shrinking free tier is closer to a business correcting an unsustainable early offer than a bait-and-switch. The practical takeaway isn’t “avoid free tiers” — it’s “don’t assume today’s number is next year’s number,” which is a much cheaper mistake to plan around than to discover after the fact.

FAQ

Why do AI tools have smaller free tiers than the same company’s non-AI features? Because AI features have a real, ongoing cost per use, unlike most traditional software features, which cost close to nothing per additional free user once built. Companies subsidize AI free tiers less because each free AI interaction is a genuine expense, not just a fixed engineering cost.

Will free AI tiers keep shrinking? Likely, at least until AI compute costs come down significantly — the underlying economics that caused tools like Freshdesk and Tidio to cut their free AI allowances haven’t changed, so more tools following the same path is a reasonable expectation, not a certainty.

How do I avoid getting caught off guard by a shrinking free tier? Treat a generous free AI allowance as a current state, not a permanent feature — check terms for whether usage limits are monthly or total, and budget for the possibility of a paid tier before a free feature becomes essential to how you operate.

Is there any AI tool with a genuinely stable free tier? Nothing is guaranteed to stay the same indefinitely, but tools where the AI feature is a smaller part of the overall product — Grammarly’s core grammar-checking, for instance — have generally kept their non-AI free features more stable than the AI-specific limits layered on top.

---

This piece is part of the pricing-analysis series on this site. See The Hidden Pricing Tricks Every AI Tool Uses for the broader pattern this fits into, and Best AI Tools for a One-Person Business for where free tiers currently stand across the full stack.