What can you actually get for free?

"Free tier" is doing a lot of work in AI marketing. Here is what is actually free on 17 July 2026, and what you hand over for it.

Google's free tier has a clear shape

Nobody states the pattern, but it falls out of the pricing page immediately:

Read that as three rules:

1. Every Flash text model is free. The whole speed-optimised line, current generation included — but not the Flash Image variants, which fall under rule 3.
2. The current Pro is not. Gemini 3.1 Pro has no free tier at all — not even a trial quota.
3. Pictures are never free. No image model has a free tier. Not one.

The interesting exception is Gemini 2.5 Pro, which is free — an older-generation Pro. The offer is essentially: a superseded flagship, or the current fast line, free. The current flagship, never — and no image model, at any generation.

That is a coherent commercial position, and a genuinely generous one. It is also not what "free tier" implies.

What the free tier costs

Google's API terms are explicit that the unpaid tier is a trade, not a gift. On Unpaid Services — which expressly includes AI Studio and the unpaid Gemini API quota — Google uses your content to improve its products, and human reviewers may read your inputs and outputs.

The terms say plainly: do not submit sensitive, confidential or personal information to the Unpaid Services.

On paid quota, the same document says Google does not use your prompts to improve its products. The tier is the privacy setting. There is no toggle. See how to stop AI tools training on your prompts.

So the free tier is excellent for learning, prototyping and anything public — and disqualified for client work, by the vendor's own instruction.

Free that stays free

Two options do not involve this trade at all:

Local models. Download a GGUF file, run it with Ollama or LM Studio, and nothing leaves your machine. No quota, no terms, no reviewer. The cost is hardware you already own and a quality gap against frontier models that is real but narrowing.

LM Studio publishes a $0 tier for exactly this: local models on your own machine, with paid cloud credits sold separately for when you want a frontier model.

Claude publishes a $0 consumer plan, with Pro at $20/month ($17 annually). Anthropic's consumer plans use your chats for training only if you enable it, and Incognito chats are excluded regardless — a different structure from Google's, where the tier decides.

What we would actually do

• Learning or prototyping? Google's free tier is the most generous offer here by a distance. Use it, and paste nothing you would not put on a postcard.
• Client or company data? Enable billing before the first request. On Google this is the entire control, and their terms tell you so.
• Want free and private? That is local models, and it is the only honest answer in this category.
• Need image generation? There is no free lunch. Budget cents per picture — see what an AI image actually costs.