141 of the 252 tools we tracked on 11 September 2026 offered a free tier. Fifty-six percent — a reassuring number that falls apart the moment you split it by category.
In some categories, every single product will let you in for nothing. In others, essentially none will. And the dividing line is not generosity. It is whether the vendor needs you to bring a colleague.
The two extremes
Everyone is free
- Project Management — 9 of 9
- Productivity & Notetaking AI — 9 of 9
Almost nobody is
- HR & Payroll — 1 of 9 (Deel, and only its HR core)
- AI Search & GEO — 5 of 34 (15%)
- SEO & Content Optimization — 2 of 9 (22%)
The pattern underneath
The categories where free tiers are universal share one property: the product gets more valuable as more people use it.
A project management tool with a single user is a to-do list. Free seats are how Trello and ClickUp get through the door of an organisation, and the invoice arrives later, when the team has quietly assembled inside the product. The free tier is not charity. It is the distribution channel, and it is the cheapest one those companies have.
Now look at payroll. Your payroll system is not more useful because a colleague also runs payroll. There is no loop to exploit. The compliance burden is per-customer and real, and a free payroll user costs the vendor money from the first day. So HR and payroll sells trials and demos, and one product in nine offers anything permanent.
AI search tools are the interesting exception, because they could work the viral way — every brand checking its visibility has competitors who will want to check theirs. They still charge. That is the cost base talking: every check is a metered model call, and free users burn real inference.
“Free” is three different products
Counting free tiers is easy. Counting the ones that are actually useful is the work, and it is where most comparison articles quietly give up.
Permanent and genuinely usable. Trello, ClickUp, Obsidian. You can run real work through these indefinitely without paying, and plenty of people do.
Permanent and decorative. Enough to tour the interface, not enough to do the job. Common in analytics, where the free tier caps events somewhere below any real site’s traffic.
A trial wearing a free-tier badge. Nightwatch and Mentionova both advertise free access; both are time-limited. Ahrefs Brand Radar’s “free” is an Ahrefs account, which does not include Brand Radar at all.
Only the first kind should move a buying decision. The other two are marketing copy with a checkbox next to it.
So what do you actually do
In a category where free is universal, never pay before you have used it — and treat a vendor who will not offer one as telling you something. In project management, that is a real signal.
In a category where free is rare, budget for the evaluation itself. You are going to pay to find out whether the product works, so make that period short and structured: buy one month rather than one year, write down what it has to do before you start, and decide against the list rather than against the feeling.
Free-tier status recorded per tool from the vendor’s own page. Full dataset.
Which software categories still give you a free tier — and which quietly stopped. DigiJaws, 2026. https://digijaws.com/reviews/which-software-has-a-free-tier/