AI Chat Tools Compared
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Free AI chat tools — and where each free tier runs out

All 11 of these let you start without paying. The difference is what happens on day three, when you've hit the limit.

ChatGPT

OpenAI's general assistant with tools, files, voice and images

Free tierNot officially available in

Claude

Anthropic's assistant built for long documents and code edits

Free tierNo mainland China edition; r

Gemini

Google's assistant wired into Gmail, Docs and Search

Free tierPersonal accounts are not op

Grok

xAI's assistant with a live X feed and 500K context

Free tierNo mainland China edition; r

DeepSeek

Open-weight reasoning model with very low API prices

Free tierDirectly reachable inside ma

Doubao

ByteDance's free Chinese assistant, voice and images first

Free tierDirectly reachable in mainla

Kimi

Moonshot's assistant built around 1M-token reading

Free tierDirectly reachable in mainla

Qwen

Alibaba's Qwen assistant with open weights and cloud APIs

Free tierDirectly reachable in mainla

Yuanbao

Tencent's free assistant tied into WeChat content

Free tierDirectly reachable in mainla

GitHub Copilot

AI coding assistant that runs inside your editor

Free tierNeeds a GitHub account, and

Perplexity

Answer engine that cites sources on every reply

Free tierUnreachable from mainland Ch

What a free tier really gets you

For short tasks — rewriting an email, explaining a concept, summarising one page — free tiers are enough and you should not pay. The three things that break a free plan are: long documents (context limits bite), sustained use (message caps), and the better model behind the paywall.

If your work is one of those three, plan for a paid plan on the tool you use most rather than spreading three free accounts across three products — you'll spend more time re-pasting context than you save.