I fact-checked the free tiers of 20 AI tools. Most listings were wrong.

I run a small AI tools directory - 4,323 entries, filterable by pricing. For the first month, almost every tool page was built from a single sentence of upstream text plus a template paragraph. That is the standard scaled-content setup, and it is wrong in ways that are easy to measure.

So I picked the 20 highest-traffic pages (211K to 414K reads each in the source data) and rewrote them from primary sources: vendor pricing pages, docs changelogs, model cards, and - where the vendor site was unreachable from my network - two or three dated 2026 secondary sources cross-checked against each other. Every claim now carries a source URL and a fetch date.

Three error classes came up over and over. None of them were typos.

The Adobe Firefly entry still said "Firefly 3". The current flagship image model is Firefly Image Model 5, announced at Adobe MAX in October 2025, with native 4-megapixel output and broad availability since early 2026. The page also described Firefly as an image tool, while the web app now covers video, audio, vector and Boards.

This is not cosmetic. Firefly's paid tiers are published (Standard $9.99/mo with 2,000 credits, Pro $19.99 with 4,000, Pro Plus $49.99 with 10,000, Premium $199.99 with 50,000), and standard image and vector generations are unlimited on any paid plan - credits get spent on premium models at 10 per Image 5 generation and 100 per second of 1080p video. A reader who budgets against the old listing buys the wrong tier.

One entry mixed Nano Banana 2 (gemini-3.1-flash-image) with Nano Banana Pro (gemini-3-pro-image). They are different tiers with different prices. Per-image API pricing on the 2 line runs $0.067 at 1K, $0.101 at 2K and $0.151 at 4K, and Nano Banana 2.1 - GA on 2026-10-06 - roughly halves that to $0.0336, $0.0504 and $0.113.

Merging them is how a directory ends up telling people a model costs twice what it does.

Google's free image-generation allowance is published as roughly 20 images a day on the basic tier, 50 on Plus, 100 on Pro and 1,000 on Ultra - with Google itself warning the caps change often. Fine. But the price of Google AI Plus showed up as both $4.99 and $7.99 in two independent 2026 sources, and I could not settle it. That page now says the price is unconfirmed instead of picking the nicer-sounding one.

Same with Anthropic: Claude Opus 5.5's usage is governed by a rolling 5-hour cap plus a weekly cap, published as multiples of Pro, not absolute message counts. Anthropic does not print the numbers. So we do not either - and the page says why, instead of inventing "200 messages per 5 hours".

Because the only thing that separates a directory from a search result is the answer to "can I afford this, and will it do the thing". The pricing split across those 4,323 entries is 2,198 free, 1,425 freemium, 700 paid - which means most of the catalogue is affordable, and the useful work is telling people where the wall actually is.

I have done 20 of 150 top pages. The remaining 130 are templated, and I would rather ship them slowly than ship them wrong.

If you want to check the argument against real listings, the free-tier filter is here - every row shows its pricing type, and the pages I rewrote carry the facts above:

https://aiverse.mindutil.com/free-ai-tools?utm_source=devto&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=topic

Corrections welcome, especially from people who maintain these tools - if a listing is out of date, send the pricing page that beats mine.