AI Shortlist · Guides
"Free plan" means three very different things. Knowing which one you're on is the whole decision.
| Shape | What it looks like | Verdict |
|---|---|---|
| Free forever, capped | Generous limits on minutes, messages, seats or exports | Often genuinely enough for one-person work |
| Free with a hard wall | Usable today, useless the moment you're busy | Fine for a test, never for a workflow |
| Free that isn't | Card required, auto-converts after 14 days | Not free — a delayed purchase |
• Minutes or messages per month — the cap that bites first in transcription and assistants.
• Retention — how long your data stays. Short retention makes a free tier useless for records.
• Exports — no export means your work is locked in. That is the real upgrade lever.
• Seats — one seat is a test; five seats is a team rollout with a price tag.
• Rate limits under load — a free tier that fails on your busiest day cannot be trusted.
You can run a small business on free tiers for these tasks: writing and editing (any one frontier assistant's free tier), note-taking and transcription (the free tier with the best retention — and pay per meeting if you exceed it), receipt capture (usually bundled with your business card), documents and spreadsheets (the AI features already inside the suite you pay for), forms and automation (free tiers of the workflow tools, capped at a few hundred runs a month).
Upgrade when a free tier's cap is the thing slowing you down, not when a feature list tempts you. That's usually the first month you hit the wall twice.
Pricing and caps change frequently. Verify current terms on the vendor's own page before you rely on them.