Free tiers moved in both directions at once — and layer only half explains it
Quick answer
Free-tier moves are running in opposite directions at the same time: of 23 dated moves, 16 narrowed a free tier and 7 widened one, and 22 of the 23 land inside a single 31-day window (2026-06-30 to 2026-07-30). The direction tilts with what the vendor sells — 13 of the 16 narrowing moves are seat-shaped applications and all 7 widening moves are developer-facing APIs or dev tools — but that tilt is our own coding of documented moves, not a vendor-stated rationale, and it is not a rule: Cerebras, Gladia and Novita are usage-metered developer APIs that narrowed anyway, and on the corpus's own `pricing_model_taxonomy` field the correlation weakens to 7 of 9 narrowing and 3 of 6 widening. The binding constraint is measurement: `has_free_tier` cannot see any of this, because a permanent recurring free tier and a 14-day trial both set it true.
Evidence over time
23 supporting · 5 counter — hover or tap a point for detail, click to jump to the row.
Evidence
| Company | Date | What happened |
|---|---|---|
| Poe | Mar 2026 | NARROWED (app/seat layer, and the precedent for the wave that followed). The Free tier's daily compute-points allowance fell from ~3,000/day to ~300/day — a ~90% cut — with no changelog entry, help-centre update or announcement; the date and magnitude are corroborated by three independent third parties, not by Poe. The same lever was pulled on the paid side on 2026-07-28: Premium's monthly allowance went from 1,000,000 to 660,000 compute points (-34%) with the $19.99 sticker price unchanged. |
| Lokalise | Jun 2026 | NARROWED (app/seat layer). The perpetual $0 plan was retired in the same release that CUT Growth from $499 to $375/mo — price down, door closed. Explorer at $144/mo becomes the entry point and a 14-day no-credit-card trial is the only free path in. Growth's bundled allowances shrank too: 300K to 225K processed words/yr and 50K to 40K Pro AI words/yr. |
| Qodo | Jun 2026 | NARROWED (app/seat layer). The permanent free Developer tier was dropped alongside per-seat pricing ($30/user/mo annual), replaced by a 14-day trial and a team-wide pooled credit balance at $0.012/credit sold in 2,500 / 5,000 / 20,000-credit packs. Qodo now states it does not offer a free plan. |
| Speechmatics | Jul 2026 | WIDENED (developer API layer), and the direct counterpart to Gladia 16 days later. The free monthly allowance grew from 2,400 to 3,000 minutes (50 hours: 1,200 real-time + 1,800 batch) plus 1M free TTS characters, no card required, while real-time enhanced speech-to-text was cut from $0.56 to $0.43/hr and a new multilingual Batch Melia 1 model landed at $0.129/hr. |
| Bright Data | Jul 2026 | WIDENED (developer API layer) — and it is the exact inverse of the app-layer move. Web Unlocker, SERP API and Web Scraper API each gained a genuinely recurring 5,000-results-per- month free tier with NO credit card, replacing a one-week, 1,000-record one-time trial. The old $1.1 and $1.0 per-1k committed rates were removed in the same restructure ($1.5/1k PAYG, a single $499/mo Scale tier at ~380K included with $1.3/1k overage, Enterprise by quote). |
| Unstructured | Jul 2026 | WIDENED (developer API layer), and in precisely the dimension Cerebras and Gladia narrowed: the 15,000 free pages became a MONTHLY reset instead of a one-time allowance. A $3,000/mo bill cap was added on top, above which pages are free up to 1M pages/mo, against a flat $0.03/page list rate. |
| Artisan | Jul 2026 | NARROWED (app/seat layer) — the hardest single retraction in the window. The public self-serve credit rate card published earlier in 2026 (Free $0/300 credits, Intern $250/mo /12K credits, Employee $600/mo/30K credits, plus a credit estimator and a 10,000-credit $300 free trial) was replaced by three sales-gated lead-volume tiers — Team ~2,500 leads/mo, Scale ~6,000, Enterprise — every card reading "Talk to sales." No Free tier, no estimator, no self-serve checkout. Its second retreat from public pricing in two years. |
| 6sense | Jul 2026 | NARROWED (app/seat layer) — and the fastest reversal in the window. The free Sales Intelligence tier (50 data credits/mo, company & people search, sales alerts, list builder, Chrome extension, self-serve "Start for Free") was removed eight days after the 2026-07-06 capture that documented it. The page now shows only three quote-based bundles, all routing to Book a Demo, with no published dollar figures and no self-serve entry. |
| Freshworks | Jul 2026 | NARROWED (app/seat layer). The $0 three-user Freshsales Free plan is gone from the page, ending a freemium ladder Freshsales had run since its 2022 post-IPO repackaging; only a 21-day no-credit-card trial remains, and the FAQ states the account is suspended if no plan is chosen at trial end. Seat prices did not move ($9/$39/$59 per user/mo annual) — and the same release printed add-on prices for the first time (Freddy AI Agent $49 per 100 bot sessions, Branded documents/CPQ $19/user/mo). |
| Puzzle | Jul 2026 | NARROWED (app/seat layer), via a single footnote. "Starter plan is free until $20k of transaction volume" — a genuine usage threshold that let a pre-revenue company stay on real books indefinitely — became "Starter is free for 2 months," paired with a struck-through $25 list price and a "100% off for 2 months" badge. Starter and Core AI credits were relabelled "25 credits life time" where they previously read "25 credits". Subscription prices unchanged. |
| Cognition | Jul 2026 | NARROWED (app/seat layer) without deleting the tier. Devin's Free plan CTA became "Download" (Devin Desktop) instead of a sign-up, and every Devin Cloud row — cloud agents, DeepWiki, Devin API, Ask Devin, concurrent sessions — is marked not-included on Free. Headline prices held at $0/$20/$200 and $80 + $40 per full dev seat: the entitlement moved, the price did not. |
| Cerebras | Jul 2026 | NARROWED — and it is a LAYER CROSSER, a usage-metered inference API that time-boxed free anyway. The card was relabelled from "Free" ("the easiest way to get started with Cerebras," unmetered across all models subject to rate limits) to "Free Trial": $5 in credits after account creation. The docs add two conditions the marketing card omits — the credits arrive only after adding a verified payment method, and they expire 30 days after they are granted. A standing perpetual allowance became a one-time, carded, expiring grant. |
| Novita AI | Jul 2026 | NARROWED — the second LAYER CROSSER, and a different shape: free is a property of a SKU, not of an account. Tencent's Hy3 moved off $0/$0 to $0.14/M input and $0.58/M output, emptying Novita's free-LLM shelf entirely (only an audio model, MOSS TTS v1.5, remains a Free listing). The catalog was pruned 221 to 196 models in the same capture. No account changes state, so nothing in `has_free_tier` registers the loss. |
| Gladia | Jul 2026 | NARROWED — the third LAYER CROSSER, and the cleanest recurring-to-one-time conversion in the corpus. "10 hours of transcription free every month" was replaced by a single non-resetting 50 EUR signup credit (Gladia puts it at ~80+ async or 60+ real-time hours), alongside a move from arrears billing to a prepaid wallet with auto top-up. Per-hour rates did not move: $0.61 async / $0.75 real-time on Starter. |
| Photoroom | Jul 2026 | NARROWED (app/seat layer). The Free plan card was dropped from the app pricing page (the subhead still reads "Start for free") and the Weekly billing option disappeared, in the same capture that replaced relative multipliers with absolute allowances (8,000/25,000/75,000 AI credits and 1,000/3,000/10,000 exports per month). Plan dollar fields still render blank, and the credit FAQ now warns the monthly credit amount "may vary depending on your country or region." |
| Maxio | Jul 2026 | NARROWED (app layer, developer-facing surface). The free "Build / Try for free" developer- sandbox column was removed from the three-plan compare table and its standalone callout deleted; the sandbox survives only as a footer link, not a listed plan. Grow held at $599/mo (up to $100k monthly billings), leaving no free option merchandised on the pricing page. |
| Exa | Jul 2026 | WIDENED (developer API layer), for the second time in a month. The signup credit doubled $10 to $20, the recurring monthly credit rose $7 to $10, and the payment-method requirement for the monthly credit was dropped — so every Free Tier account now gets it, not only carded ones. The "20,000 requests/month" framing was replaced by pure credits. It had already expanded on 2026-07-14 (free tier 1,000 to 20,000 requests/mo, a 20x move). |
| You.com | Jul 2026 | WIDENED (developer API layer) by adding a free tier where none existed. The Web Search API card was restructured from a flat $5.00 per 1,000 calls to "Free / 100 calls per day," with the unchanged $5.00/1k rate applying only above that daily quota. The API docs had not yet been updated to mention the free quota at capture time. |
| Socket | Jul 2026 | WIDENED (developer tool) — and it is the crosser on the widening side, because Socket is a per-developer subscription rather than a usage meter. The Free plan's tracked-dependency cap rose 1,000 to 10,000 (10x) between the June and July 2026 archived snapshots, while Team ($25/developer/mo) and Business ($50/developer/mo) list prices held steady. |
| Hyperline | Jul 2026 | NARROWED (app layer). "10 invoices free, no credit card" is gone and the new Launch/Growth/Scale ladder has no free tier at all. The entry price moved from $199/mo + 0.6% of billed revenue to a flat $599/mo (up to $2M annual revenue, 100 active contracts), with Growth and Scale custom-quoted — a take-rate abandoned and a free door closed together. |
| Playground | Jul 2026 | NARROWED (app/seat layer) by squeezing rather than deleting. Free downloads fell 10 to 2 per day and the rolling PGv3 generation cap fell 10 to 5 images per 3-hour window; the promo-code field was removed from the Pro checkout cards. Pro ($15/mo) and Pro Plus ($45/mo) are unchanged. Free's own plan-card copy still advertises "up to 10 images every 3 hours" — an unresolved live discrepancy on Playground's page. |
| Gumloop | Jul 2026 | NARROWED (app/seat layer), and the purest on-ramp deletion in the window. The permanent $0/mo, 5,000-credit, 1-seat Free plan was removed and replaced by a 14-day Pro trial offered ONLY on monthly billing — selecting Annually removes the trial CTA and goes straight to a paid signup button. The Pro slider ($37/20k credits up to $1,840/1M credits) was confirmed unchanged across four capture cycles (2026-06-02, 06-30, 07-23, 07-30), so nothing about the price moved: only the door. |
| Firecrawl | Jul 2026 | WIDENED (developer API layer) on the same day Gumloop narrowed. Every plan card — Free, Hobby, Standard, Growth, Scale and custom Enterprise — gained a flat "+1,000 search credits" line beneath its main allotment, identical regardless of plan size, on top of the unchanged 2-credits-per-10-results Search rate. Headline plan fees ($0/$16/$83/$333/$599/Custom) were re-confirmed unchanged. |
Counterexamples
- Cerebras · Jul 2026 — Listed in evidence above as a narrowing move, and repeated here deliberately: it is evidence FOR the two-directions observation and a counterexample AGAINST the layer explanation. A usage-metered inference API with no seats converted an open, rate-limited Free tier into a one-time $5 credit trial — the move the layer story predicts only for seat-shaped apps. Novita (2026-07-21) and Gladia (2026-07-22) are the other two crossers.
- Diffbot · Apr 2024 — Ran Gumloop's 2026-07-30 move exactly backwards, two years earlier: a permanent free-forever plan (10,000 credits/mo at $0/credit, no credit card) REPLACED the 14-day trial, and the page headline changed from "Plans starting at $299/mo" to "Plans starting at Free." Proof the direction is reversible and not a one-way ratchet.
- GitHub Copilot · Dec 2024 — A $0 Free plan was LAUNCHED (and Copilot Individual renamed Pro at the unchanged $10/mo) — a seat-shaped app adding a free tier, which the layer explanation would not predict. Copilot still does not publish the Free tier's credit allowance ("limited chat and agent usage"), so even where a free tier is added the entitlement can stay unobservable.
- Gorgias · Jul 2026 — A third shape neither arm captures: Gorgias has no free tier at all (`has_free_tier` false), yet it bundled an AI Agent allotment into every paid plan (30/30/190/530 automated interactions) with overage at a flat $1.50 per automated interaction, up from $0.90. The AI capability became free-at-the-margin inside paid tiers — free access moving without a free tier existing.
- Helicone · Jan 2025 — The mid-arc case that neither "killed" nor "widened" describes: the free monthly request allowance was cut from 100,000 to 10,000 (a 90% reduction) and the free tier then simply stayed there — Hobby is still free forever at 10,000 requests/month in 2026. Narrowing does not have to end in deletion.
Trivia
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The `has_free_tier` field held at exactly 215 companies while its rate fell from 64% (215 of 338) to 61% (215 of 353) — the 15 companies added in between contributed zero free tiers, so the percentage moved three points with no vendor changing anything. In the same stretch five vendors converted a permanent free plan into a clock (Lokalise 14-day on 2026-06-30, Qodo 14-day on 2026-06-30, Cerebras $5 credit trial on 2026-07-21, Puzzle two-month promo on 2026-07-21, Gumloop 14-day on 2026-07-30) and the boolean did not move for any of them.
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2026-07-30 is the corpus's sharpest single-day contradiction on this axis: Gumloop deleted a permanent $0/mo, 5,000-credit, 1-seat Free plan in favour of a 14-day Pro trial offered ONLY on monthly billing (switching to annual removes the trial CTA entirely), while Firecrawl added a flat +1,000 search credits per month to every plan card — Free through custom Enterprise, identical regardless of plan size. Neither vendor changed a headline price on the day.
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Two speech-to-text APIs moved in opposite directions 16 days apart, which the layer explanation cannot separate: Gladia (2026-07-22) replaced a recurring 10-free-hours-per-month allowance with a single non-resetting 50 EUR signup credit, while Speechmatics (2026-07-06) grew its recurring free allowance from 2,400 to 3,000 minutes a month and cut real-time enhanced from $0.56 to $0.43/hr. Same layer, same modality, opposite direction, same month.