A carousel came past my feed this week: five websites, all free, all AI, screenshots included. The sort of post that gets thousands of saves and about eleven actual visits. I opened all five, because I have a weakness for checking whether the thing does what the caption says.
Three of them were worth the click. Two of them I’m not linking. And “free” turned out to mean something different in every single case.
The one that had already closed
The first slide points at labs.google and Google’s ImageFX, with a caption about stunning, ultra-realistic images. In the screenshot, at the top of the page, sits a purple banner from Google: image generation is moving to Flow, and you can create in ImageFX until April 30, 2026.
That was three and a half months ago. The recommendation contains a photograph of its own expiry date, and nobody in the chain noticed. Which tells you roughly how much AI tool content is assembled rather than used.
Flow itself is still worth your time. Google’s image and video generation lives there now; it’s very good, and the free tier is real, if modest. Just go to the tool that exists.
The one where the payment is you
yupp.ai puts GPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok, DeepSeek and a few dozen others behind one prompt box. The caption says most paid AI tools at no cost. That’s not quite it.
Yupp runs on credits. You earn them by comparing two model answers side by side and saying which one you prefer. A private chat costs around a hundred credits, a follow-up around fifty, and if you keep voting, you earn back more than you spend. Your chats are shared with the model providers.
So it’s free the way a supermarket tasting stand is free. You’re not the customer, you’re the palate. Labelled human preference data is one of the more expensive things in this industry, and Yupp has found a pleasant way to collect it in volume. That’s a fair trade if you know you’re making it, and a slightly less fair one if you thought you’d found a loophole. Use it for the thing it’s actually excellent at: putting five models on the same question and seeing which answer you prefer before you commit to a subscription.
The one with the counter in the corner
artflo.ai gathers Sora 2, Veo 3.1, Kling, Seedance, PixVerse and the rest onto one node-based canvas. Same caption: free, just type a prompt.
Bottom right of that same screenshot, next to the Run All button: ✦ 18. That’s a credit balance. Video generation costs real GPU minutes, and nobody is absorbing that on your behalf out of enthusiasm. Free here means a starting balance, which is a trial, which is fine. Trials are useful, and an aggregator like this saves you five separate subscriptions while you work out which model you actually need. It’s just not the same word.
The two I left out
The remaining slides were a site streaming current cinema releases and a library offering 43 million books as PDFs. Both work. Neither is free. The cost has been moved onto the people who made the film and wrote the book, which is a different arrangement from nobody paying.
I’m not going to write a lecture about it, and I’m not your conscience. But a post that recommends a piracy site in the same breath as Google Labs is quietly telling you it hasn’t thought about any of the five links. That’s the part worth noticing.
What’s actually going on here
Free splits into four kinds once you look at it: expired, trial, data-funded, and someone else’s invoice. Only one of those survives your first fifty prompts, and it’s the one where you’re the raw material.
None of this makes the tools bad. Flow, Yupp and Artflo all earn a place in a normal working week, and I’d recommend all three to someone who asked. It makes the carousel bad, and carousels are how most people decide what to try next.
Four kinds of free, one dead link and two invoices sent to strangers. For a post with five slides, that’s quite a return.
