Every AI coding tool's free tier, compared — and what they won't tell you

Verified against official pricing pages and docs on July 5, 2026. These numbers change without notice — if you spot a stale one, tell us and we'll fix it with a changelog entry.

Every AI coding assistant has a free tier. Almost none of them will tell you, in numbers, what it contains.

We pulled the official pricing pages and docs for eight tools and graded each on one axis: does the company publish hard numbers for what you get — or vibes? Scale: HARD NUMBERS / PARTIAL / VAGUE.

The one that answers the question

GitHub Copilot is the only tool of the eight that publishes complete numbers at every tier: 2,000 completions a month free; $10/mo buys unlimited completions plus exactly 1,500 monthly AI credits (1,000 base + 500 flex), with a published conversion rate — one credit is one US cent — and published credit tables all the way up the tier ladder (docs.github.com). You can compute what you're buying. Nobody else in this table fully lets you.