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Free tiers are now dated liabilities, and AI vendors keep shortening the date
Free quotas expire on the vendor's schedule, and on AI platforms that schedule is measured in months. The exit costs more than re-plumbing, so it belongs in the integration budget.
The Engineer · Build desk
What happened
- PlanetScale removed its free tier in April 2024 for every user, taking 5GB of MySQL storage and a billion monthly row reads with it, and gave no grandfathering.
- Suno's August 2026 download caps applied retroactively to songs made before the announcement, and pulling a library off the platform now costs money.
- Perplexity cut free users to five Pro searches a day in May 2026 and stopped honouring existing API keys after a 14-day window.
Why it matters
- cost Deferring the exit hands the vendor pricing power over your own egress: the migration bill gets written after you are committed, and can reach content you created under the old terms.
- constraint Spreading exposure across providers stops working as a hedge when the tightening is synchronised inside a few weeks, because there is no generous incumbent left to fall back on.
- exposure Whatever a team pasted into an unpaid tier is already inside the vendor's training pipeline, so leaving ends the ingestion and recovers nothing; a free-tier prototype carrying client data is a...
- precedent Fourteen days is now a defensible notice period for switching off working API keys, which means procurement should read any unspecified notice term as roughly two weeks.
The useful unit here is notice. Reddit's API stayed free for more than ten years before its 2023 repricing, and Heroku's free dynos ran over a decade before being switched off in 2022, with fraud and abuse cited as the reason [6][2]. Mistral opened a free API tier in September 2024 with no credit card required [7], and the dev.to tally that collects these cases puts the open phase at five months [9]. Measured against Heroku's window, the time you get to plan in has contracted by a factor of at least 24 [18].
The pattern itself is old and named: Cory Doctorow's "enshittification" dates from 2022 and was the American Dialect Society's word of the year in 2023 [17], and someone now maintains a chronological Free Tier Graveyard with a cause of death per entry [22]. Outside AI it still moves at the old pace. SendGrid's free 100 emails a day "forever" became a 60-day trial in 2025 [3], and Firebase moved its free 5GB of Cloud Storage to a paid plan in February 2026 [4].
Inside the AI window, the deprecation clock ran ahead of the pricing clock. In November 2024, about two months after the free tier opened [21], Mistral retired a batch of endpoints including Mistral 7B and Mixtral 8x7B and gave four months to migrate [10]. That landed before the February 2025 free-tier caps and the $14.99 Le Chat Pro tier [8]. By June 2026, OCR pricing had doubled and smaller models were 50 to 100 percent dearer [11]. The rewrite arrived before the first invoice did.
The mechanism previous cycles lacked sits on the input side. Google's Gemini free tier is explicit about the trade: free tokens in exchange for using prompts and generated responses to improve Google's products, with human reviewers permitted to read and annotate them, and the paid tier exempt, which is why the terms say not to submit sensitive, confidential or personal information to the Unpaid Services [14]. Meta's unpaid Llama API terms grant the same right over inputs and outputs [15]. GitHub Copilot has trained on free and Pro interactions since April 2026 unless the user opts out [16]. Twitter never trained on your API calls and Heroku never trained on your app's behaviour [24], which is why leaving those platforms was a re-plumbing job and nothing more.
Perplexity presented its May 2026 reset as a way to invest in faster reasoning models [13]. According to the dev.to account, it arrived weeks after Google tightened free API access, OpenAI placed ads in ChatGPT's free tier, and Anthropic tightened peak-hour limits [23].
The replacement price is sometimes legible in advance. Le Chat Pro at $14.99 a month is $179.88 per seat per year [19]; Perplexity's five Pro searches a day works out to roughly 150 a month before you pay [20]. Those are the easy numbers. With open phases measured in months, the exit has to sit in the same budget line as the integration, or it is not budgeted at all.
What to watch
- Whether any AI vendor publishes a committed notice period for free-tier changes and endpoint deprecations, rather than announcing them with the change.
- Whether an unpaid-tier provider offers deletion or exclusion of data already ingested for training, which is currently the part of the exit that cannot be undone.
- Whether the next tightening comes from a vendor that has so far kept free access generous, which would confirm the clustering rather than the coincidence reading.
Clarity's read
What the record supports and how the coverage leans. The claims behind it follow.
Reality
- Evidence40
- Adoption62
- Hype gap+28
- Incentives42
- Confidence45
Claim ledger
Ranked by verification strength, evidence, and original report placement.
- [1]
In April 2024 PlanetScale killed its free tier for all users, not just new ones, removing 5GB of MySQL storage and a billion row reads per month, with no grandfathering or gradual phase-out; production databases had to migrate on a deadline.
- [2]
Heroku killed its free dynos in 2022 after more than a decade, citing "fraud and abuse".
- [3]
SendGrid's "free 100 emails/day forever" became a 60-day trial in 2025.
- [4]
Firebase Cloud Storage moved its free 5GB to the paid plan in February 2026.
- [5]
Twitter's free API was available for years before being killed in 2023.
- [6]
Reddit's API was free for over a decade before the pricing change in 2023.
- [7]
Mistral launched a free API tier in September 2024: free experimentation, no credit card, alongside price cuts across all models.
- [8]
By February 2025, Mistral free users had a daily message cap and lost access to the flagship model, and the Le Chat Pro subscription launched at $14.99/month.
- [9]
According to the dev.to piece, Mistral's open phase lasted five months and the close phase is still running.
- [10]
In November 2024, before Mistral's free tier limits took effect, several model endpoints were deprecated in a single batch, including Mistral 7B and Mixtral 8x7B, forcing migrations within four months.
- [11]
By June 2026, Mistral's OCR pricing had doubled and smaller model pricing had risen 50 to 100 percent.
- [12]
Suno offered unlimited generation and downloading during its growth period, then in August 2026 imposed retroactive download caps that apply even to songs created before the announcement; libraries stay on Suno's servers and getting content off the platform now costs money.
- [13]
Perplexity reset its free tier in May 2026: five Pro searches per day, no file uploads, no API access, with existing API keys ceasing to work after a 14-day migration window; the company framed the change as a way to invest in faster reasoning models.
- [14]
Google's Gemini API free tier gives free input and output tokens in exchange for Google using prompts and generated responses to train its products; human reviewers may read and annotate API input and output; the paid tier does not do this, and the terms state "Do not submit sensitive, confidential, or personal information to the Unpaid Services."
- [15]
Meta's Llama API terms state that users of unpaid services "grant Meta a right to use their Inputs and Outputs to train and improve Meta's AI models".
- [16]
GitHub Copilot's free tier, since April 2026, uses interactions from free and Pro users to train models unless they opt out.
- [17]
Cory Doctorow named the three-stage platform decay process "enshittification" in 2022, and the American Dialect Society made it Word of the Year in 2023.
- [18]
Mistral's five-month open phase is at least 24 times shorter than Heroku's free tier window of more than ten years.
- [19]
Le Chat Pro at $14.99 per month is $179.88 per seat per year.
- [20]
Five Pro searches per day is about 150 per month.
- [21]
Mistral's November 2024 endpoint deprecation batch came about two months after the free tier opened in September 2024.
- [22]
Someone has started tracking free tier withdrawals in a chronological "Free Tier Graveyard", each entry with a cause of death.
- [23]
According to the dev.to piece, Perplexity's change came weeks after Google tightened free API access, OpenAI placed ads in ChatGPT's free tier, and Anthropic tightened peak-hour limits.
- [24]
Twitter did not train on users' API calls and Heroku did not train on an app's behaviour; training on free-tier usage did not exist in previous platform decay cycles.
Sources
1 independent publisher whose own reporting we read for this story.
- dev.toEvery free tier dies. AI is killing them in months, not years.
1 article · August 24, 2026
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