You can work without a $20/mo sub. You cannot expect free tiers to match Opus 5 / GPT-5.6 Sol on every agentic coding bench.
Free or generous
- Claude free tier — rate-limited; still strong for writing and careful reasoning
- Google Gemini apps — good multimodal entry; check current board for which Gemini SKU leads video/image
- Perplexity free — research with citations; capped
- GitHub Copilot — student / OSS programs when you qualify
- HuggingChat / open playgrounds — try open instruct models without a card
Free forever (local)
Ollama + LM Studio. Private, offline-capable, you own the knobs.
Quick map
| Job | Free-ish start |
|---|---|
| Chat / writing | Claude free or Gemini |
| Research | Perplexity |
| Coding (student) | Copilot program |
| Private | Ollama |
When free hits a wall, look at the paid frontier on /leaderboard before you subscribe blind.