Free AI plans aren't shrinking so much as splitting: the features keep coming, the compute is what's going

Free AI plans are evolving, with features increasing while compute resources decrease. For example, NotebookLM (now Gemini Notebook) replaced fixed daily counts with a compute budget that refills every 5 hours, subject to a weekly ceiling, with longer chats consuming more. This trend is observed across various platforms like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Grok, indicating that free tiers are diverging, making it challenging to determine the "best" free option as offerings frequently change.

This report uniquely highlights how free AI plans are splitting, with features increasing while compute resources decrease, unlike earlier analyses focusing solely on shrinking plans.