Can you work professionally with free AI?

It's the question everyone asks before getting the card out, and I asked it too. So I put the same tasks from my work through the free versions of eight services, and I'll tell you what each gives you without paying, where it cuts you off and what hidden price "free" carries. At the end, an honest plan to get started without spending.

"Build your business with AI without spending a single euro." There are dozens of videos with that title and they all have one thing in common: the person telling it doesn't work that way. I wanted to check for real, so I spent two weeks working only with free versions on real tasks, without touching my subscriptions.

The short answer, up front: yes, you can use AI for free to try things out and for one-off tasks; for heavy use, no. As soon as the work piles up, the limits appear exactly when you need them most, a law of nature as reliable as toast landing butter side down.

There's also another free route few people know about: downloading open models and running them on your own computer. I'll come back to it.

I picked four tasks from my daily work: summarising a technical document of about forty pages, drafting a proposal for a client from some messy notes, reviewing and fixing a server configuration script, and building a comparison table from three spreadsheets. The same ones on every service, with personal accounts, and the test closed on 14 September 2026.

On each service I looked at four things: what it lets you do, when it cuts you off, which model it gives you (the "brain" that generates the answers, which isn't always the best in the house) and what it does with your conversations.

A clearly visible warning: free terms change often, sometimes from one month to the next. What I describe holds for that date.

ChatGPT. The free version of ChatGPT lets you chat, write, summarise and upload the odd file. When you use up your quota, it drops you to a more limited model or you have to wait. In my test, it handled the summary and the proposal well, but on the comparison table it ran out of quota halfway and the fallback model gave me a table with two columns swapped. One important detail: beware of apps advertised as "free ChatGPT" that aren't from OpenAI; the real one is at chatgpt.com.

Claude. The free version of Claude is used from claude.ai and has a message cap that renews every so often. What catches people out is how that cap gets spent: the longer the conversation and the bigger the documents, the sooner you hit the limit, because the assistant has to reread everything on every reply. That's why it pays to open a new conversation for each topic. With the forty-page document and the script fix it came out best, but it cut me off on the third task and I had to wait several hours. Note: Claude Code, the tool for working as an agent on your files, is a different product with its own terms, and it wasn't part of this test.

Gemini. The free version of Gemini only needs a Google account, so if you have Gmail you're halfway through the door. The mess is the naming: Google calls the chat Gemini, and the models underneath, and what shows up in Gmail or Docs, and other tools in the family, such as Gemini Notebook, formerly NotebookLM. And what you see built into Gmail or Docs depends on your account type. With the spreadsheets it was the most comfortable, and for the proposal it gave me a correct but overly generic text, the kind you can tell a mile off that nobody wrote.

Copilot. First you need to know which one we're talking about, because Microsoft has called too many things Copilot. There's Microsoft's chat, which has a free version; there's GitHub Copilot, for programming, which has a free tier with usage limits (checked in September 2026); and there's the Microsoft 365 one, inside Word or Excel, which depends on your subscription. Each with its own terms, which is why searching for free Copilot gives such muddled answers. I tried the chat: it did fine with the summary and the proposal, and with the script it gave me an acceptable fix but without explaining what it had changed. For a small business the advice is clear: before paying for anything extra, check what you already have.

DeepSeek. DeepSeek is a Chinese company and also the name of its assistant and its models. You can use it as a chat, through its API (the door that lets other programs use the model) or by downloading some of its models, which it publishes openly. In my test, it fixed the script very well and fast, and the summary came out right; with the proposal I struggled to stop it sounding like a translation. What you type in its chat goes to its servers: according to its own privacy policy, data is stored in the People's Republic of China (checked in September 2026).

These are the three Chinese ones I use. GLM is the model family from Z.ai, the company formerly known as Zhipu AI. You use it in its chat, via API or by downloading the model. On the test date I could use its chat without paying and without hitting the limit; the script and the table came out well, the proposal somewhat stiff.

Kimi is Moonshot AI's assistant, known for handling very long texts and for models designed to work as agents. It has free use with limits from its website and apps. With the forty-page document it was among the best: it summarised the whole thing without losing the thread.

MiniMax is famous for its Hailuo video generator, but it also has text models, the M series, for conversation, coding and agent work. Its free chat did the job for the summary and the script; with the table it got tangled up in the formats.

One warning that applies to all three: being able to download a model doesn't mean it fits on your computer. The large versions are designed for data centres. What I use each one for in my work I explain more calmly in Kimi, GLM and MiniMax, the Chinese alternatives I use.

Quite a lot, and well. During the test I got out, without paying, a technical summary I used as is in a meeting, two client proposals that only needed a once-over from me, and fixes to several maintenance scripts.

Three tricks that worked for me:

• Short conversations. One conversation per topic. Endless ones eat the quota and the assistant gets confused too.
• Spread the work. If one cuts you off, carry on with another. Having three or four services open is how you stretch the free stuff.
• Save the good instructions. When a way of asking for something works, copy it into a document.

And the local route, which is the truly free alternative, with its small print: you need a machine with enough memory, you pay for the electricity and you put hours into setting it up. The models that fit at home are smaller than the cloud ones, and on hard tasks it shows. What machine you need I explain in What hardware you need to run your own AI.

Where free breaks down: heavy use, agents and daily work with clients. The day I had to review a client's project in depth with several long documents, three services cut me off before mid-morning and I finished the task the next day.

And then there's the hidden price: free usually means you pay with your data or your time. What I checked in September 2026:

• ChatGPT: what you type can be used to train its models unless you turn that off in settings.
• Claude: since its 2025 terms update, you choose whether your conversations are used for training; you change it in the privacy settings, under the option to help improve Claude.
• Gemini: with saved activity turned on, some conversations may be read by Google staff and used to improve its models; you turn it off on your Google account's activity page.
• DeepSeek: its data is stored in China, according to its policy.
• Copilot, GLM, Kimi and MiniMax: I haven't been able to review their terms in the same detail; read them yourself before putting in anything sensitive.

A hard rule, no exceptions: no client data in free versions without having read the terms.

I pay for Claude, which is my main tool, and the DeepSeek API for some automations. I pay for those because they're the ones I use every day and the ones that save me the most time; the rest I use as backup, often in their free version.

I'm not giving you prices. If you're wondering how much ChatGPT Plus costs or any other subscription, the real price is in the app itself, with your country's taxes included. One detail that confuses a lot of people: the subscription doesn't include the API, which is pay-per-use access for programs and automations, and is paid for separately.

My recommendation for beginners: squeeze the free version for a couple of weeks and pay only when the limit genuinely holds you back.

Verdict on the promise? Building a business without spending a single euro on AI is possible if the business is small and you have the patience to hop from one service to another. Working professionally, every day and with clients, on free tiers, no. The test cost me two weeks of juggling and a handful of tasks finished the next day. Free is great for learning. To make a living from it, you have to pay something.