Free plan, trial or credits: which is it?

Short answer. “Free” on a pricing page can mean three different things. An ongoing free plan has no end date but has limits. A free trial ends after a period or allowance. A one-time credit grant is a balance that runs out, sometimes within days. Before you build a routine on a tool, find out which one you are being offered and what happens when it ends. Each vendor’s checkout and terms remain the final authority.

The three kinds, with examples we recorded

Kind	What it means	Examples from our research (21 October 2026)
Ongoing free plan	No stated end date. Limits apply and may reset daily, monthly or never	Otter.ai: 300 transcription minutes a month and 3 lifetime imports. Zapier: 100 tasks a month. Fathom: unlimited recordings and transcriptions
Free trial	Full or partial access for a period or allowance, then you pay or lose access	Pictory: 14 days with 15 video minutes. Jasper: a 7-day Pro trial. Photoroom: Pro and Max show a trial, length not stated
One-time credit grant	A balance that does not renew	Lindy: $50 of credits that last 7 days, no card. Pitch: its free plan includes 100 one-time AI credits that do not renew

Two things catch readers out. A tool can have a free plan and a one-time grant (Pitch). And a limit can be per day, per month or for your lifetime: Otter’s three imports never come back.

Is free enough? Five questions

1. How often will you do the task? A task you do once a month may fit inside a monthly allowance. One you do every day may not.
2. What is the limit measured in? Minutes, tasks, credits, exports, or size per file. Compare it with one real job, not a typical one.
3. What does the free plan remove? Watermarks, resolution, export formats, history, collaborators, commercial use. Fliki’s free plan adds a watermark and a 5-minute export limit. Pixelcut’s pricing page lists a commercial licence on paid plans only.
4. What happens at the limit? The tool may stop, queue work or ask you to pay. Make’s page says scenarios stop when credits run out.
5. What happens to your work if you leave? Check export options and how long the tool keeps your files.

If one real job fits the free limit with room to spare, free is probably enough for now. If it uses most of the allowance, assume you will need to pay or switch.

Credits are not all alike

A credit is whatever the vendor says it is. Make says most actions use one credit. Lindy pools credits across a team and says they do not roll over. Fliki deducts credits by the duration of audio generated or video exported. These are three different rules, so credit counts cannot be compared across tools, and we do not convert them into a cost.

Tokens are the same problem. Bolt lists 1M tokens a month with a 300K daily limit on its free plan. Leonardo.Ai lists “150 fast tokens a day” and a token bank. Lovable uses credits for builds. Each word is the vendor’s own unit, and the pages we read do not give an exchange rate between tools. We could not find an official definition to cite for language-model tokens, so we do not define the term here. Look for the definition on the vendor’s own help page before you rely on a number.

“Free” software you run yourself

Open-source or source-available software can be downloaded without a licence fee, but running it is not free. You pay for a server or hosting, and you take on updates, backups, security and fixing outages. n8n has a Community Edition on GitHub, and its pricing page lists a self-hosted Business plan at €667 a month on annual terms. We have not read the Community Edition’s licence terms, so check them before you rely on it for a business.

A simple way to decide

1. Write the one job you need done.
2. Run it on the free plan or trial, and note what you hit: a limit, a watermark, a missing format.
3. Put a date in your calendar before a trial ends, so a card is not charged by surprise.
4. If the limit stops you, compare plans using how to read an AI pricing page and seat costs and annual commitments.
5. Browse tools with confirmed free plans to see allowances side by side.

What we have not verified

Trial lengths for several tools, whether trials need a card, and what any free plan permits commercially. We have not tested any of these plans.

Sources and dates

Vendor pricing pages read on 21 October 2026: Otter.ai, Zapier, Fathom, Pictory, Jasper, Photoroom, Lindy, Pitch, Make, Fliki, Pixelcut and n8n. Jasper’s trial length and Lindy’s credit terms come from fresh reads of those pages on this date.