I have been re-checking free tiers across the apps I cover, and the pattern is clear enough to write down: the free tier that you could genuinely live in is becoming rare, and the word “free” is increasingly doing work it has not earned.
This is not a complaint about companies charging money. It is a note about the gap between what the signup page implies and what you get.
What changed
Two years ago a free tier in this category usually meant a real allowance. Limited, obviously, but it reset, and you could use the app indefinitely at a slower pace without ever paying. That was the norm.
What I now see more often is a fixed bundle handed out once. A number of credits, or a number of messages, with no reset. You use it in an evening, you hit a wall, and the wall is a payment form. That is a trial. Calling it a free tier is a marketing decision, not a description.
The distinction is easy to test and almost nobody tests it before signing up: does it come back tomorrow? If yes, free tier. If no, trial.
Why it is happening
The honest answer is compute cost, and you can see it in which apps kept a real free tier and which did not.
Nearly half the apps I have tested run a credit system, and in every case those are the apps whose headline feature is image or video generation. Generating a picture costs the company real money per picture in a way that generating a paragraph does not. An app built around visuals cannot give away a meaningful amount of its core feature and stay solvent.
The apps that have held onto a usable free tier are, with few exceptions, the ones where text is the product. That correlation is tight enough to predict from the product description before you ever see a pricing page.
What it means if you are starting out
Three practical consequences.
Budget for the app you will use in month two, not week one. The free tier is now more often a sales tool than a product. Judging an app by it tells you about the demo, not about what you are buying.
Check the reset before you invest time. Building a character and a shared history in an app you will abandon at the paywall in three days is a waste of the one thing you cannot get back.
A smaller free tier is not the same as a worse app. Some of the best apps I have tested have almost nothing free, and some of the most generous free tiers belong to apps I would not pay for. The two things are not related, and treating a generous free tier as a quality signal will lead you wrong.
Where the genuinely free options sit
There are still apps with a free tier that resets and is usable rather than decorative, and they are the ones I point people to when the question is “I want to try this without a card”. The current shortlist is in my free AI girlfriend ranking, and the entries there are the ones I have re-checked most recently, because this is exactly the kind of thing that changes without announcement.
The bigger picture
I think the direction of travel is obvious and mostly reasonable. These are expensive products to run, the early free tiers were subsidised by investor money rather than by a business model, and that phase is ending across consumer AI generally, not just here.
What I object to is the vocabulary. A trial is a fine thing to offer. Calling it a free tier, when the previous generation of the same product used that phrase to mean something you could keep using, trades on a definition the industry itself established. If you are going to end the free tier, end it. Do not rename the trial.
For what a subscription actually costs once you are past the free part, my pricing report has the numbers across 22 apps.