Free AI tools: the difference between a trial and an allowance

Search for a free AI image generator and almost everything you find is one of two products wearing the same word. One hands you a block of credits, and when the block is spent the button stops working. The other gives you an allowance that comes back. They are not variations on a theme — one is a sample and the other is a service, and knowing which you are looking at is the only thing that makes "free" a useful word. Here is which one ours is, how it refills, and the four places it stops dead.

A trial is a stock. An allowance is a flow.

The distinction is worth being precise about because it changes what you can plan around. A trial grant is a stock: a fixed quantity, spent once, after which the product is a paywall with your work behind it. Its purpose is to demonstrate, and it is finished the moment it has. An allowance is a flow: a rate at which credits arrive, indefinitely. Its purpose is to be used, forever, at a level the operator can afford.

Both are legitimate. What is not legitimate is calling a stock a tier, which is how somebody ends up building a workflow on top of a number that was always going to run out. So: ours is a flow, and the rest of this page is the mechanism and the boundaries.

How the allowance actually refills

The green wallet accrues continuously rather than resetting at midnight. The rule is one twenty-fourth of your tier's daily cap per hour, settled whenever the balance is read — so on the free plan that is a credit roughly every seventy-two minutes rather than twenty credits landing in a lump. Four properties of it are worth knowing because they are all deliberate:

The daily green cap on every plan, and what else moves with it
PlanGreen a dayParallel jobsStorageVideo short side
Free⚡20250 MBclamped to 480 px
Starter⚡1003250 MBuncapped
Creator⚡20052 GBuncapped
Pro⚡4001010 GBuncapped
Ultra⚡2,000100100 GBuncapped

Which plan: The free plan needs an account and no card. What that account buys is the own-GPU lane: images from ⚡1, video on LTX 2.3 and MiniMax H3 Studio clamped to a 480 px short side, chat on the included models, and an assets library inside 50 MB.

What the allowance actually buys

Being specific in both directions is the point of this page, so here is the covered half before the uncovered one. On the free plan, ⚡20 a day reaches four image models on our own GPUs — Z-Image Turbo, Qwen Image Edit, Krea 2 Identity and Krea 2 Turbo — from ⚡1 a picture. It reaches both own-GPU video lanes, LTX 2.3 in its four modes and MiniMax H3 Studio, at a 480 px short side. GPT Image 2 sits beside them at 0 credits for three runs a day. Chat runs on the included models at five replies a day, prompt enhance costs a fraction of a credit, and the assets library, folders, projects and albums all work inside the 50 MB storage limit. Two jobs run at once. Nothing on that list is a preview of itself: those are the real models on the real pipeline, billed by the same code that bills a paying account.

Where the free plan stops, in full

This is the section most pages like this one leave out, which is exactly why it is here. None of these are surprises we discovered later — they are the boundaries the product was drawn with, and every one of them is a place where somebody else's money starts being spent.

What the free plan does not cover
Not includedWhyWhat opens it
Every hosted modelNano Banana Pro, Seedream, Kling, Veo, Seedance, Grok and FLUX invoice us per call, and green cannot pay an invoiceStarter, paid in gold
Everything that generates audioSpeech, sound effects, voice cloning, lip sync and the mixer are hosted; the server refuses a non-paid plan at the route, not just in the interfaceStarter
Video analysis and moment searchBilled entirely from the gold wallet at every tier — green cannot pay for any part of it — and gated to paid plansStarter, paid in gold
Turning the watermark offFree and Starter output always carries the mark, whatever the setting saysCreator
Brain vaultsDurable storage plus an embedding pass over everything in itStarter
Full-resolution videoFree renders are clamped to a 480 px short side before pricingAny paid plan

Watch out: Speech-to-text is the one to read carefully. It is free while our own Whisper service is answering. When that container is busy or restarting, the request falls through to a paid provider and costs ✦1 gold per started minute — which a free account has no way to pay. It is not "unlimited free transcription" and we will not describe it that way.

The one real trial here, and we call it one

There is exactly one stock-shaped grant on this platform, and it is the pre-signup picture. A signed-out visitor can press Generate once and get a genuine render from our own GPU on Z-Image Turbo — one copy, normal queue lane, kept and moved onto the account if they sign up afterwards. Its wallet never refills, on purpose: if it trickled back up to ⚡20 a day it would be giving away the thing the sign-up exists to offer. Rate limits are five per IP address a day and one per browser.

That is a trial, it behaves like a trial, and the button says so rather than pretending to have run out of credits. Everything after it is the allowance.

The one model that is free on every plan

GPT Image 2 costs 0 credits at every tier and takes up to six reference images, with a daily allowance rising from three runs on Free to two hundred on Ultra. The catch is stated plainly in our own catalogue: it rides a single shared subscription rather than a metered key, so when that subscription's daily allowance is exhausted the model pauses for everyone until it resets. Zero credits is not zero cost, and it is not a way to route around the credit system.

Five questions to ask of any free tier

  1. Does it refill, and at what rate? "100 free credits" and "100 free credits a day" are different products sharing four words.
  2. Does it accumulate or fill to a cap? A cap means time away is not banked. Say so, as we just did.
  3. Which models does the free currency actually reach? A free tier that reaches only a demo model is a trial with better manners.
  4. What does the output carry? Watermarks, resolution clamps and storage limits are all real and all easy to leave out of a feature list.
  5. What happens to the work when the free period ends? Ours does not end, and the pre-signup picture is claimed onto the new account rather than discarded.

Start on the free plan — No card. The daily allowance needs an account; the first picture does not.

Is the free plan a trial that expires?

No. The green wallet refills toward its daily cap every hour, for as long as the account exists. There is no card, no expiry and no point at which it converts into a paywall. What it does have is a fixed set of models it can pay for.

Do unused free credits roll over?

No. The wallet fills toward the cap and stops, so a week away leaves you with one day's worth rather than seven. That is deliberate: a single shared GPU cannot absorb months of banked credits spent in one evening.

Can I buy more free credits?

No, and that is not a paywall trick — green credits are structurally not for sale. Bundles buy gold, which is the wallet for hosted models and queue priority. Only moving up a plan raises the daily green cap.

What can the free plan not do at all?

It cannot reach any hosted model, cannot generate audio of any kind, cannot run video analysis, and cannot switch the watermark off. Video is also clamped to a 480 px short side and storage stops at 50 MB.

Do I need an account?

For the allowance, yes, and it takes an email and no card. Without one you still get a single real picture on our own GPU before signing up, and that work is moved onto your account when you make one.