Runway gives you 125 credits. Once. They never come back.
Pika gives you zero and sells you packs. Notion gives Free and Plus users something it calls a trial of Notion AI, and the real thing starts at $20 per member. Google's ImageFX gave people a genuinely good free image generator and then shut down on 30 April.
All four of those pages used the word free.
I have spent the last month checking pricing pages for other reasons, mostly correcting posts on this site that had gone stale. The same thing kept turning up. The word free is now doing five completely different jobs, and a reader cannot tell which one they are looking at from the headline.
So here are twelve tools that advertise a free tier, sorted by what the word actually does. Every figure came off the vendor's own page, with the date I read it.
The five that renew
These are free tiers in the sense you probably mean: an allowance that comes back without you paying.
| Tool | What renews | When |
|---|---|---|
| Craiyon | unlimited watermarked generations, plus 2 Pro | daily, no signup at all |
| GitHub Copilot Free | 2,000 completions and 50 chat requests | monthly |
| InVideo | a credit allowance, no card required | every Monday, 12am UTC |
| Hugging Face | 2 minutes of GPU, anonymous | daily |
| Suno | 50 credits | daily |
Craiyon is the outlier in this whole piece and deserves the credit. No account, no email, no card, unlimited generations with a watermark plus two higher-quality ones a day, paid for with ads between generations. That is the only tool here you can use without the company knowing who you are.
Two caveats that matter more than they look.
Hugging Face meters anonymous users down hard. You get 2 minutes of GPU a day without an account, 5 with a free one, and 40 on PRO at $9 a month. Two minutes is a handful of images, not an afternoon.
Suno's free tier has no commercial rights. Fifty credits a day, every day, and you cannot sell anything you make with them. That line sits in the plan comparison rather than next to the credit count, which is where most people stop reading.
The two that hand you a grant and stop
This is the category that catches people, because it looks identical to the one above until the credits run out.
Runway. Their pricing page says it plainly:
125 one-time credits to explore Runway's AI tools
and elsewhere, more plainly still: a one-time deposit of 125 credits that doesn't expire. The credits do not expire. They also do not return. Standard is $12 a month billed annually for 625 credits a month.
Gamma works the same way. The free allowance is 400 credits granted at signup, and they do not renew. When they are gone the routes to more are referrals or a paid plan.
The word that tells you which category you are in is once, and it is never in the headline.
The two that are trials wearing the word free
Pictory has no free tier. There is a trial. The plans are $29, $59 and $199 a month, or $25, $35 and $119 if you pay for a year, which is the figure the page shows you by default.
Notion is subtler and worth understanding, because the naming actively misleads. Notion's own pricing page gives both the Free plan and the $10 Plus plan a "trial of Notion AI". Not a smaller allowance, not a reduced tier. A trial. Notion Agent, AI Meeting Notes and Enterprise Search all start at Business, $20 per member per month.
So a solo user on Plus who upgraded expecting AI did not buy a cheaper version of it. They bought a workspace tier that does not include it.
The three where free used to exist and does not now
Pika. Their pricing page lists the free plan as:
Free · 0 credits / month · packs only
You can make an account. You cannot generate anything until you buy a pack. Starter is $10 a month for 900 credits.
Mage.space used to let you generate anonymously, which is why it was worth recommending. It now offers a "300 Gems Sign-up Bonus", which is both a signup wall and a one-time grant in the same sentence.
Google ImageFX closed on 30 April 2026. Its own URL, labs.google/fx/tools/image-fx, now redirects to flow.google.com with the parameter from=imagefx attached, which is Google politely routing the stragglers somewhere else. Whisk went the same way on the same day.
How to tell in ten seconds
You do not need to read a pricing page carefully. You need to find one word.
Words that mean it renews: per month, per day, monthly, resets, refreshes, every week.
Words that mean it does not: one-time, to get started, to explore, sign-up bonus, deposit, welcome credits.
If you cannot find a renewal word anywhere near the free allowance, assume there is not one. Pricing pages are written by people who know exactly which word they chose.
Then check two more things, separately from the credits:
Commercial rights. Suno renews 50 credits a day and grants no commercial use. A generous allowance you cannot sell the output of is not free for the thing you probably want it for.
Whether an account is required at all. Of these twelve, exactly one lets you generate without identifying yourself.
Why this is happening
It is tempting to read this as companies getting greedier, and I do not think that is quite it.
Every free tier before this generation was built on storage and bandwidth, which are cheap and get cheaper. A free Dropbox account costs the company pennies a year. The economics of giving away a gigabyte improve every year without anyone deciding anything.
Inference does not work that way. Every image, every video second, every agent run costs money at the moment it happens, and a heavy free user can cost more in one afternoon than a paid subscriber pays in a month. The free tier stopped being a marketing line item and became a variable cost nobody can forecast.
What you are watching across these twelve is companies finding out what a free user costs them and reacting. Some metered it, some capped it, some moved it to a one-time grant, and some removed it. The ones that kept a genuine renewing free tier either have another way to pay for it, like Craiyon's ads, or are large enough not to notice, like GitHub.
That tells you something useful about which free tiers are likely to survive. Ask what pays for yours. If the answer is nothing, the answer is also not forever.
What I would actually do
If you need something free and renewing today: Craiyon for images with no account, GitHub Copilot Free for code, Suno for music you are not selling.
If you are starting a project on a free tier, find the export button before you need it. Two tools in this piece have already closed, and a third announced its closing date while I was writing. That is covered in more detail in what happened to these AI tools, which tracks the ones that shut down, got renamed, or have a published end date.
And if a tool matters to your work, pay for it. Not as a moral point. A $10 plan you chose is more predictable than a free tier someone else can change on a Tuesday, and most of this post is a list of Tuesdays.
Sourcing
Twelve tools, checked against each vendor's own pricing or documentation page on the dates below, from India on desktop. That last detail matters more than it used to: one vendor confirmed to me in writing this month that plan sets vary by country and device, so a pricing page read is a read of one country's pricing page.
Read on 9 October 2026: Runway's one-time 125 credits and the $12 Standard plan, Pika's zero-credit free plan and $10 Starter, Suno's 50 daily credits, absence of commercial rights, and $8 Pro plan.
Read on 8 October 2026: Craiyon's no-signup model, Hugging Face's 2 and 5 minute GPU quotas, Mage.space's signup bonus, and the ImageFX redirect to Flow.
Read on 5 October 2026: GitHub Copilot Free's 2,000 completions and 50 chat requests, and Notion's trial-of-AI wording on both Free and Plus.
Read on 29 September 2026: Pictory's absence of a free tier and its plan prices, and InVideo's weekly reset.
One weaker row. Gamma's 400 non-renewing credits could not be read from gamma.app, which returns 403 to automated requests, and its help centre has no article on credit allowances. That figure comes from consistent agreement across independent write-ups rather than from Gamma. It is the only number here I cannot point at a primary source for, and it is flagged rather than quietly included.
Free tiers change faster than anything else on a pricing page. If you are reading this months from now, the five that renew are the rows most likely to have moved.
