The four kinds of free tier, and how to tell them apart

There are four kinds of free tier, and the word “free” tells you nothing about which one you are looking at. A free tier that stays free puts no meter on the thing you came for: Bitwarden Free syncs unlimited logins across every device you own, and Pluto TV plays without a subscription, a card, or even an account. A capped free tier is usable, but the cap is the sales pitch — GitHub Copilot Free allows 2,000 code completions and 50 chat requests a month. A trial wearing a free-tier badge simply ends: 1Password has no free plan at all, just 14 days. And a free tier that lost something used to include a feature and now does not, which is the pattern worth learning to recognise — LastPass Free has been restricted to a single device type since 16 March 2021. Every limit on this page was read on 21 August 2026.

You will notice there is no price table at the top of this piece, which is unusual here. That is deliberate. Nothing on this page is a price. Everything on it is a cap, a device count or a date, because that is the vocabulary free tiers are actually written in — and the dates matter more than anything else.

The four kinds, side by side

One: it stays free

The first kind is rarer than the marketing volume suggests, and it has a structural tell. The free tier is unmetered on the job you actually opened the app to do, and the company is paid by something other than you upgrading.

Pluto TV and Tubi are the clean version. Both are advertising businesses that happen to look like streaming services, so there is no meter, no card and no account requirement — Pluto TV will play to a browser that has never told it anything, though signing in does widen what you are shown. The cost is ads and a catalogue you do not choose.

Bitwarden Free is the version worth a closer look, because password managers are the category where a free tier has to be permanent to be worth anything at all. A password vault you have to abandon in eighteen months is not a saving, it is a migration project. Bitwarden’s free plan stores unlimited logins, notes, cards and identities and syncs them across your devices, with the paid tier holding back file attachments, the integrated authenticator, vault health reports and emergency access. Every one of those is a genuine feature and none of them is the reason you installed a password manager. Proton Pass Free is built the same way: unlimited logins, notes and passkeys across unlimited devices, with the upsell sitting in aliases, monitoring and sharing rather than in the vault itself.

Proton VPN Free is the only entry here that manages this in a category where bandwidth costs the vendor real money. There is no data cap and no speed cap. The limits are shape instead of volume — one device at a time, around ten countries, and no picking your own server. That is a genuine free tier with an awkward shape, which is a different thing from a metered one, and worth distinguishing.

Two: it is capped, and the cap is the pitch

Most free tiers are this. A cap is not a trick. It is an honest structure, provided it is stated plainly and it stays where it was put.

Cloud storage is the whole category, effectively. Dropbox Basic gives 2 GB, three linked devices and 30 days of version history, with no expiry and no card. Google’s shared allowance covers Gmail, Google Drive and Google Photos out of one pot, a design that quietly turns “I have plenty of storage” into “my email has stopped arriving”. GitHub Copilot Free meters the same way in a different unit: 2,000 code completions and 50 chat requests a month, which is enough to form a habit and not enough to run a job on. That is exactly what a well-designed cap is for.

Windscribe’s free plan is the one with a wrinkle worth printing. It is 10 GB a month if you confirm an email address and 2 GB a month if you do not, so the default state of a free account is one fifth of the advertised allowance until you hand over a contact detail. That is not hidden, but it is not the number on the poster either.

The question to ask about a capped tier is never whether the cap is generous. It is whether the cap has moved before.

Three: a trial wearing a free-tier badge

Some things called free are a price with a timer attached. 1Password has no free plan at any tier; what it has is a 14-day trial that does not require a card. Backblaze runs the same shape at 15 days. Midjourney stopped offering free trials in March 2023, citing demand and trial abuse, and has not brought them back — the community feed is free to read, but making an image requires a paid plan.

None of that is dishonest. All three state it. The confusion is caused by the button, not the terms: “Try free” and “Free plan” occupy the same spot on the page in the same colour, and the difference between them is a duration buried a line lower.

The test is mechanical. Look for a number of days anywhere in the offer. If there is one, it is a trial. And “no credit card required” is not evidence to the contrary — it means the trial cannot bill you by surprise, which is a courtesy about billing, not a statement about price.

There is a hybrid worth knowing about too. LastPass Free ships with a 30-day trial of Premium bolted on top of it, so the first month of a genuinely free tier behaves like the paid one. That is fine as long as you know which day the change happens, and most people do not, because nothing on screen marks it.

Four: it used to include that

This is the pattern this desk cares about most, because it is the only one that can reach into a decision you already made and change it after the fact.

The examples are not edge cases. Microsoft cut free OneDrive storage from 15 GB to 5 GB effective 27 July 2016 and removed the 15 GB camera-roll bonus at the same time. Existing users could keep what they had, but only by opting in by 31 January 2016 — before the cut took effect, through a form most of them never saw. OneDrive still advertises 5 GB free today.

Dropbox capped free accounts at three linked devices in March 2019. Google Photos ended unlimited free backup on 1 June 2021, after which uploads count against the shared account allowance. LastPass restricted its free tier to one device type on 16 March 2021, which is the single most consequential change on this list: a password manager that works on your laptop but not your phone is not a limited password manager, it is a different product. LastPass’s own homepage still says “Limited to 1 device type” today.

Evernote restricted free accounts to 50 notes and one notebook from 4 December 2023, with existing notes left readable, editable and exportable but no room to add. Plex moved remote streaming of your own files behind a paid pass effective 29 April 2025, with enforcement starting on Roku in November 2025 and extending across its other TV apps through 2026; playing your own library inside your own house is still free. And Peacock did the complete version — free tier closed to new sign-ups in January 2023, then withdrawn from the free accounts that already existed later the same year.

Then there is the live one. On 21 August 2026 Google’s support documentation described a Google Account as including “up to 15 GB” of storage. On the same day, Google’s own Google Photos product page described a flat “15 GB”. The “up to” appeared in Google’s documentation in March 2026, and 9to5Google reported in May 2026 that new accounts were being created with 5 GB until a phone number was linked. Google has announced nothing, and we have not seen a reduction on an account of our own, so we are not calling this a cut. We are noting that the wording moved, on the record, with a date — because in every case above, the wording moved first.

The four questions to ask before you move in

You do not need a site like this one to classify a free tier. You need four questions and about ninety seconds.

1. What is the meter, and is it on the thing I came for? Storage, requests, devices, days, countries. Find the unit. If the meter is on the core function, you are on a capped tier and you will hit it. If the meter is on a feature you would not have used anyway, the tier is effectively unmetered for you.
2. Is there a duration anywhere in the offer? Any number of days makes it a trial. Check the terms, not the button, and ignore whether a card is required.
3. What happens to my data if I stop paying, or never start? Read-only, deleted, or held? Evernote left free users able to read, edit and export what they already had. That is the humane version, and it is not guaranteed anywhere.
4. Has this free tier changed before? Search the product’s name with “free tier” and a year that is not this one. A company that has cut a free tier once has demonstrated it is willing to, and that is the only forward-looking signal available to any of us.

What we cannot tell you

We cannot tell you what any of these free tiers will include in 2027. Nobody can, including the companies, and any page that implies otherwise is guessing.

We also cannot promise grandfathering. Every example above where existing users kept what they had — OneDrive, Dropbox, Google Photos, Evernote — was a discretionary choice by the vendor, not an entitlement, and in the OneDrive case keeping it required an action inside a deadline. Plan for the terms as written, not the terms as currently applied.

Figures here are US terms, in the US market, read on 21 August 2026. A free tier is a product decision rather than a price, so it moves less predictably than a price does, and it moves without an announcement more often.

The best free tier in this piece is Bitwarden Free, on one test only: it is unmetered on the exact thing you install a password manager to do, and it has not been narrowed while everyone around it was narrowing theirs. The worst thing in this piece is not any of the trials. It is 31 January 2016 — a deadline to keep something you already had, published before the change it protected you from, and missed by almost everyone.