What free plans actually give you, tool by tool

The differences that decide whether you can ship anything on free

Every tool on this site has a free tier, and they are not comparable. Some give you a usable allowance every month; some give you a watermark and a cap; some give you access but no rights to what you make. This page collects what the vendors' own pages state, so you can tell which kind you are looking at before you spend a week on a tool.

Not a ranking, and not advice to stay on free. It is a reading of each vendor's own description of its free tier, checked on the date shown on each entry.

The jobs, and what covers them

ElevenLabs — free tier

ElevenLabs — A free tier exists and paid plans start at $5/mo. Character credits are the constraint, and they disappear fast on long-form scripts.

What it is bad at: Commercial rights and licensing terms need reading before you monetise anything made on it.

Descript — free tier

Descript — A free tier exists and paid plans start at $24/mo. Export and transcription hours are metered on the lower tiers.

What it is bad at: The limits are on hours, not on features, so what breaks first is a long recording rather than a specific tool.

Perplexity — free tier

Perplexity — A free tier exists; Pro is $20/mo. Citation behaviour and Spaces are the reason people use it, and both are usable on free to a point.

What it is bad at: Pro search limits apply during peak demand.

Notion — free tier

Notion — A free tier exists; paid plans start at $10 per seat per month. The workspace itself is usable on free for a solo creator.

What it is bad at: The AI add-on is a separate paid product — it is not included in the free workspace.

Opus Clip — free tier

Opus Clip — A free tier exists; paid plans start at $9/mo. It is enough to test whether the hook selection works for your footage.

What it is bad at: Free-tier watermarking and clip-per-month limits are the parts that push you to pay, and the watermark is the one that matters if you publish.

CapCut — free tier

CapCut — Free is $0 and uses no credits; each video is capped at 1 minute. Free templates and basic editing tools are included.

What it is bad at: The monthly video count is disputed between CapCut's own pages — the pricing page says 3, the help centre says 1 to 3 by region — and we could not resolve it. Many templates and library sounds are personal-use only.

HeyGen — free tier

HeyGen — Free is $0 and uses no credits, with each video capped at 1 minute, plus 1 custom avatar and 1 voice clone to test with.

What it is bad at: Free outputs are limited to personal, non-commercial evaluation by the Terms, and the Terms disagree with HeyGen's own FAQ on that point. The monthly video count is also disputed between HeyGen's pages.

Canva — free tier

Canva — Free is $0 with 1.6M+ templates, 5GB of storage and up to 20 Standard or Premium AI uses a month.

What it is bad at: Locked paid sections are shown in the editor, and many templates and library sounds are licensed for personal, non-commercial use only.

Suno — free tier

Suno — Free is $0 with 50 credits a day on the v6-mini model, and no credit card needed according to the homepage FAQ.

What it is bad at: This is the sharpest free-tier restriction on the site: free-plan songs carry no commercial rights, Suno owns them, there are no monthly downloads and no stems, and upgrading later does not retroactively license songs made on free.

What this page is not

This is not a ranked list, and there is no "best" pick. Every entry linked above carries its own sourced facts, its own list of unverified items, and its own last-checked date.

None of these tools has been tested hands-on by us, so none carries a star rating. Every price quoted is a US logged-out reference price from the vendor's own page; logged-in and non-US pricing is unverified, and each individual entry lists what we could not confirm.

← All tools