In defense of not paying for AI

Fast Company Tech

by Jared Newman

February 27, 2026

If you don’t want to be left behind by the AI revolution, you really need to start paying for it. At least that’s become the common refrain among some AI enthusiasts, who seem intent on instilling FOMO in less technical users. The free versions of ChatGPT and Claude, they say, are woefully inadequate if you want to understand where things are headed—so stop being a cheapskate and hand over your $20 (or $200) a month like the rest of us. “Judging AI based on free-tier ChatGPT is like evaluating the state of smartphones by using a flip phone,” HyperWrite CEO Matt Shumer recently wrote in a widely shared essay on AI’s impact. “The people paying for the best tools, and actually using them daily for real work, know what’s coming.” I’m giving you permission to safely ignore this advice, and to not feel bad about it. While an AI subscription might make sense if you’re running into specific frustrations with the free versions, you can still get plenty of mileage without paying, and learn a lot about the state of AI in the process. Don’t be frightened into buying something that hasn’t actually proven its value to you. The state of the art is still free One way that AI boosters try to scare you into paying for AI is by arguing that the free versions are already obsolete, so any negative impressions you might’ve gotten from them are misguided. “Part of the problem is that most people are using the free version of AI tools,” Shumer wrote in his essay. “The free version is over a year behind what paying users have access to.” This claim is provably false: The free version of ChatGPT includes access to GPT-5.2, OpenAI’s latest model, which launched in December. The free version of Google Gemini includes access to Gemini Pro 3.1, which launched on February 19. Claude’s free version doesn’t include Opus 4.6, but has the same Sonnet 4.6 model that the paid version uses by default. It launched on February 17. Microsoft 365 subscribers can also select “Smart Plus” in Copilot to use GPT-5.2, without a premium AI subscription. xAI’s Grok 4 is available for free. Of course, the free versions of these tools all have usage limits, but so do the paid ones. When I signed up for a month of Claude Pro to test Opus 4.6, I quickly ran into yet another paywall. To continue the conversation, I had to either buy pay-as-you-go credits or upgrade to the $200-a-month Claude Max plan. Without paying more, I couldn’t use Claude at all—not even Sonnet 4.5—until my limit reset. My main takeaway was that I should have just stuck with Sonnet in the first place. Instead of paying for some vague feeling that you’re getting the state of the art, you should play around with what AI companies offer for free. Make them demonstrate that the results are meaningfully different before you consider paying them, not after. AI should prove itself to you, not vice versa For AI boosters, the corollary to paying for AI is that you also need to throw immense amount of time into figuring out what it’s for. Ethan Mollick, for instance, writes that you should “resign yourself to paying the $20 (the free versions are demos, not tools),” then spend the next hour testing it on various real-world tasks. Sorry, but this is backward from how software as a service should work. It’s not your job to invest time and money into convincing yourself that AI is worth more time and money. Let the AI companies do the convincing, and don’t fall prey to FOMO in the meantime. Playing the field is just as instructive If you do commit to paying for an AI tool, chances are you won’t use other AI tools as much, or at all. But that in itself isn’t a great way to understand the state of AI. What you should be doing instead is bouncing around, taking full advantage of what each AI company offers for free. That way, you’ll get a sense not just of the subtle differences between large language models, but also the unique features that each AI tool offers. You’ll also be less likely to run into usage limits, the only trade-off being that your past conversations will be scattered across a few different services. Such behavior is, of course, wildly unprofitable for all the companies involved. But again, that’s not your problem. If you’re getting sufficient value out of free AI tools, the AI companies will have to tweak their free offerings accordingly (for instance, with ads) or come up with new features worth paying for. Claude Code, for instance, is available only with a subscription, and over time we may see more paywalled tools (like Claude Cowork, which is still in early development) that cater to specific tasks or verticals. Until that happens, enjoy the free versions of AI tools, and rest easy knowing that you’re not missing much.

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Originally published on Fast Company Tech on 2/27/2026