Free AI in 2026: the list worth keeping
Student offers, teacher offers, free tiers and trials, with the deadlines and the countries attached. Everything here was checked against the company's own page, and anything we could not check is named as unchecked.
Most lists like this are copied from other lists. Offers that ended in spring sit next to offers that never existed, and none of them carry a date. This one is short for a reason: everything in it was read on the company's own page on 24 September 2026, and anything we could not confirm is marked.
If you are a student in the United States
ChatGPT Plus, four free monthly billing periods. Eligible college and graduate students at US degree granting institutions, verified through SheerID. Claim by 31 October 2026. Existing subscribers can qualify if OpenAI bills them directly rather than Apple or Google. It renews at 20 dollars a month unless you cancel.
If you teach K-12 in the United States
Claude for Teachers, free for verified K-12 educators, with a full year of access if you sign up by 30 June 2027. It connects to academic standards for all 50 states and to curriculum resources including OpenSciEd and Illustrative Mathematics. Schools and districts have a separate offering announced in August 2026.
Free tiers, which are not trials
- Claude free plan: chat on web, desktop and mobile, web search, file creation, running code, connecting apps and Artifacts. Limited by how much you use in a window, not by which features you can open.
- ChatGPT free plan: the widest free surface in one app, with its own usage limits.
The word to hold on to is tier, not trial. Neither of these expires. If your use is a few times a week, the free tier is not a stepping stone to a subscription. It is the answer.
For developers
New accounts on the developer consoles have come with promotional credits at various points this year, and the amounts have changed more than once. We are not printing a figure because we could not confirm a current one on Anthropic's own pages, only on third party sites repeating each other. Open the console and read what it offers you today.
What we left out and why
- A rival model name that appeared in our research notes but on no vendor page we could find. If we cannot open the page, it does not go in.
- A referral route described elsewhere as free Pro access. It is a prize draw for entries, not an offer, and calling it free access is how a reader ends up disappointed.
- Regional referral campaigns, including a ChatGPT one for selected users in India, Indonesia and Mexico that ended on 17 September 2026. Ended is ended.
How to check any offer in two minutes
- Find the company's own page for it. Not a blog. Not a video. The page with the terms.
- Look for the country list and the deadline. If both are missing, assume it is not for you.
- Check how you are billed if you already subscribe, because that disqualifies more people than eligibility does.
- Set a reminder for the day it ends, whether that is to cancel or to claim.
Offers we have checked by hand
Why this list is short
Because a list of things that are actually true is shorter than a list of things that have been written down. Every item above links to the page it came from, and if one of them stops being true we will mark it expired rather than quietly deleting it. An offer that has ended is still information.
Sources: Anthropic pricing, Claude for Teachers, ChatGPT for students.
A calendar, not a list
Offers are dated things, so here are the dates from this page in one place. Put the ones that apply to you in a real calendar rather than trusting that you will remember.
- 31 October 2026: last day to claim the ChatGPT student offer.
- 30 June 2027: last day to sign up for Claude for Teachers and get a full year.
- 17 September 2026: a regional ChatGPT referral campaign ended. Listed so you can recognise it when an old article recommends it.
What is worth paying for, if anything
After the free routes are used up, the question becomes whether a subscription earns its 20 dollars. A simple test that has never failed us: for two weeks, write down every time the tool saved you a task you would otherwise have done. Not every time you used it. Every time it saved you something.
At the end of two weeks, if that list has fewer than ten lines, the free tier is your plan. It is a boring test and it beats reading another comparison, including ours.
Things that are free and are not AI subscriptions
Worth remembering, because the answer to a lot of tasks is not a chatbot at all.
- Browser tools that do one job without an account, from counting words to compressing a PDF.
- Student and education pricing on the software you already use, which is often a bigger saving than any AI offer.
- The free tiers of the hosting, design and developer tools you are already paying for, which frequently include AI features nobody told you about.
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