Best Free AI Chatbots
Every model below has a free web chat product — no credit card, no API key. Ranked by quality score. “Genuinely free” means no hard daily cap for normal use. “Free with limits” means you will hit a wall if you use it heavily.
gemini.google.com — genuinely free consumer product with no announced hard usage cap for standard queries. Slowdowns possible during peak demand. This is how most everyday users access Gemini.
Paid upgrade: Google One AI Premium — $20/month
chatgpt.com — free access exists but hits a daily message cap and falls back to a less capable model. Usable for occasional queries, not reliable for daily heavy use.
Paid upgrade: ChatGPT Plus — $20/month
claude.ai — free tier exists but hits a daily message limit (typically a few hours of heavy use). Free users also lose access to file uploads and Projects.
Paid upgrade: Claude Pro — $20/month
grok.com and the X app — basic X accounts get very limited Grok access. Meaningful use requires X Premium ($8/month). This is the cheapest subscription entry point of any model in this comparison.
Paid upgrade: X Premium — $8/month
chatgpt.com — GPT-5 mini is available on the free ChatGPT tier with daily limits. Free users get more GPT-5 mini access than GPT-5.2 access, making it the practical choice for free heavy use.
Paid upgrade: ChatGPT Free — $0/month
gemini.google.com — Gemini Flash models are part of the standard Gemini web product, available free with no hard usage cap for typical queries. Same interface as Gemini 3 Pro access.
Paid upgrade: Google One AI Premium — $20/month
chat.deepseek.com — free web chat with no announced hard cap for normal use. Has experienced outages during periods of high demand (January 2025 was notable). No subscription tier — the web product is simply free.
chat.mistral.ai (Le Chat) — free tier available with daily usage limits. Mistral's consumer product is less polished than ChatGPT or Claude, but functional for evaluating the model's output quality.
Paid upgrade: Le Chat Pro — $15/month
No free consumer product
These models require payment or API access. Shown for reference.
How this list works
“Free” means a real consumer product you can open in a browser with no payment details. API free tiers (rate-limited developer access) are not counted here — see best free API tier for those. Quality scores are independent of price — a model is not ranked higher because it is free. See how we rate for the full methodology.