Hey guys, my 15 months of free Gemini AI Pro from this deal is expiring next month. I’ve been hitting it pretty hard for general topic research and really rely on it now.
Once it runs out, are there any similar free alternatives I can jump onto that don't have super strict usage limits? Mostly just need something solid for heavy text research. Cheers!
I'm in the same boat. I only had 3 months and the step down to free is harsh. I have 2 months left on Perplexity 1-year free, but I've found it's not nearly as good as Gemini Pro was.
Gemini sucks compared to Claude, so it's not like you're missing out much. I barely used my Gemini Pro that I got for free a year ago.
If you really want "free" or cheap subscriptions, there's a bunch of subreddits that sell those. Some are dodgy, some are legit, you'll have to do your own reading/research and find the one that is the most trustworthy. Some people sell them cheap because their company has some sort of plan with e.g. Anthropic and they just resell any unused licenses secretly, or something like that.
There's also Outlier AI, which gives you access to multiple models for free. It used to just be a simple account signup (no need to verify your ID) and you could access Outlier Playground AI for free. Not sure if that has changed.
Then there's the Github Copilot trick as well. With that, you get access to GPT and Claude models. The trick here is to use the subagent that runs e.g. Fable or Opus models and your main agent will run a cheap model like GPT-5 Mini. It used to be free, but now Microsoft made it so that GPT-5 Mini consumes a bit of credit, which is still fine compared to the $$$ credit that gets consumed with the high-end models. Subagents that run the high-end models are somehow not metered, so it's a bypass to getting billed heavily. Here's a link if you want to read more about it:
https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/292452
There's also Deepseek, Kimi, etc that are free. You can also run models locally for free. There's already hardware out there that are somewhat affordable to help you run AI locally.
And don't limit yourself to just Claude or ChatGPT or whatever. Look at tools like Cursor, Antigravity, Windsurf, etc. They also have their own exploits that allows you to abuse the models consumption.
There's a lot of other tricks and exploits as well, but I'm not gonna share them. If you're really desperate, just do some research and you'll probably come across a few tricks.
OR, you could just not be cheap and spend the $40/month on a proper subscription. It's not like it's unaffordable. Just learn how to use models properly to avoid token waste. Use tricks like cavemen prompts to reduce token waste, e.g. https://github.com/JuliusBrussee/caveman
Sorry can't help with your enquiry but ——- 15 months of free Gemini AI Pro………….Niiiiccceee !!