Free AI data analysis tools — what each free tier actually gives you
Updated 2026-08-01
Every AI data tool advertises a free tier, and almost none of them advertise the number that decides whether it will work for you. The plan card says "limited" or "free forever"; the figure that actually binds — how many AI calls, how much RAM, which connectors, what happens at zero — usually lives in a docs page or a comparison grid three clicks away. That gap is not an accident. A free tier is a marketing surface, and a specific limit makes it less appealing.
So this page does the reading. Below are the free tiers of seven tools that get compared for AI data analysis, with the allowance quoted from the vendor's own pricing page or documentation, read on 2026-08-01. Where a vendor publishes no number, we say that rather than estimating one. Where a vendor's own pages contradict each other — and five of the seven do — we quote both, because a contradiction is itself something you want to know before you build a workflow on top of it.
One thing to say up front, since we make one of these tools: our own free tier is in the table on the same terms as everyone else's, including the parts of it that are worse than the alternatives. If you only need to analyse spreadsheets you upload, the free tier you want is probably not ours.
The one distinction that decides most of this
Free tiers for AI data analysis fall into two groups, and the split matters more than any credit count.
The first group analyses files you hand it. You upload a CSV or a spreadsheet, it reasons over that file, and when the session ends the data goes away. ChatGPT's free plan and Julius AI's free plan both work this way — neither one's free tier lists a connector for your own SQL database. This is genuinely the right answer for a one-off question about a file someone emailed you.
The second group connects to the database or warehouse where your data already lives, on the free tier, without paying. Hex's Community plan, Wren AI's cloud Free plan, Chat2DB's Community edition, Deepnote's Free plan (for some engines only) and our own Free plan all do this. That is a different kind of tool: the question you ask on Tuesday can be re-asked on Wednesday against fresher data, because nobody had to export anything.
If your data is in Postgres, MySQL, BigQuery or Snowflake, this distinction rules out roughly half the list before you look at a single price. Work out which group you need first.
What each free tier actually gives you
| Tool | Free plan name | What the free allowance is | Reaches your own database on free? | Card required? |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Julius AI | Free ($0) | The billing docs list "100 (one-time)" credits and say "The Free plan's 100 credits are a one-time grant and don't renew." The pricing page's comparison table instead puts "Free daily credits" in the Free column with no number. The Free card lists "2 GB of RAM". File intake is ".csv, .xlsx, .sav". | No. The Free card lists one connector, "Google Drive data connector"; the comparison table's Free cell reads "Google Drive, OneDrive, Sharepoint". Snowflake, BigQuery and Postgres first appear in the Plus column. | Not stated on its pricing page |
| ChatGPT (OpenAI) | Free | No numeric allowance is published. The card says "Limited messages and uploads"; the comparison table marks Data analysis "Limited" and Interactive tables and charts "No", and lists a 27K context window for GPT Instant. The two hard numbers OpenAI does publish: "Free users are limited to 3 file uploads per day", and for spreadsheets "the file size cannot exceed approximately 50MB". | No SQL connector is listed. The data-analysis help page says to upload the data or attach it from Google Drive, OneDrive or SharePoint, and that "The Python environment used for data analysis cannot make external web requests or API calls." | Not stated for Free; the card statement covers paid plans |
| Deepnote | Free ("Free forever") | Up to 3 editors, 5 projects, 7-day revision history, and "Unlimited Basic machines with 5 GB RAM, 2 vCPU". The AI is metered tightly and the number is only in the comparison grid: "10 completions per month" for AI code completion, and "5 calls per month" each for Auto AI, Generate code, Edit code and Explain code. Inactivity period on Free is 15 minutes. | Partly. The integrations grid ticks PostgreSQL, MySQL, ClickHouse, MariaDB and MindsDB in the Free column. BigQuery, Snowflake, Redshift, Athena, SQL Server / Azure SQL, MongoDB and Databricks are ticked from Team upward. | Not stated on its pricing page |
| Hex | Community (Free) | "Up to 5 notebooks", "Small compute" — which its own compute table defines as 4 GB and 0.5 CPU at $0/hr — 7-day version history, and "Notebook agent trial". The Credits row reads "Limited" for Community with no figure. | Yes. The Community card reads "Connect any data source", and the grid ticks both Project connections and Workspace connections for Community. SSH tunnelling is ticked from Professional upward. | Not stated on its pricing page |
| Wren AI (cloud) | Free ($0) | "20 monthly free credits", plus "80 credits for the first 14 days". Limits are 2 projects, 2 members, 10 tables per project. Credits expire: "Monthly free credits do not roll-over to next month, will expire by end of each month." | Yes. "Database & Data Warehouse Connectors" is ticked in the Free column, and so is CSV upload. CSV download is not. | Not stated on its pricing page |
| Wren AI (self-hosted) | Open Source | Free. The tier card is labelled "Open Source · CLI & Engine" and says "Built for developers; no UI." It also lists "Bring Your Own LLM". The full self-hosted platform with a UI is described as an Enterprise Plus addition, not part of the free download. | Yes. Its open-source docs name "PostgreSQL, MySQL, BigQuery, Snowflake, DuckDB, ClickHouse, Trino, SQL Server, Databricks, Redshift, Oracle, Athena, Apache Spark, and more." | No — it is a GitHub download |
| Chat2DB | COMMUNITY | Described as "Fully open source edition on GitHub with limited features." The three limits published on the card are "16 Databases Only", "No AI calls included" and "Manual report generation only". In the comparison table, the Community cell for Supported AI reads "Requires AI Configuration" — the AI works, but you supply the model. | Yes, and it runs locally on your machine. Note its own README says "30+ databases", which does not match the pricing page's "16 Databases Only". | Not stated; the free CTA is a GitHub download |
| Intellrise (us) | Free ($0), after a 14-day Pro trial | 14 days of Pro with no card, then the Free plan: 1 database source plus Google Sheets, 3 dashboards with unlimited charts, unlimited reports and every export format (CSV/Excel/PDF/PPTX), AI report editing, custom instructions, and your own AI provider key. 1 seat. | Yes. One live database connection is what the Free plan is for, and Google Sheets does not count against it. | No — no card for the trial or for Free |
What runs out first, and what the vendor says happens then
"Free" almost never means unmetered. It means there is a meter you have not hit yet. These are the meters, in the vendors' own words.
| Tool | The meter that binds | What the vendor says happens at zero |
|---|---|---|
| Julius AI | 100 one-time credits on Free | They do not come back — "a one-time grant of 100 credits when they sign up; these credits don't renew" — and you cannot buy your way out on Free: "purchasing additional credits or topping up your balance is not supported." |
| ChatGPT | Rate limits on messages, uploads and analysis | "GPT access pauses until the limit resets; ChatGPT shows the reset timing in-product." For the analysis and upload tools specifically: "you will need to wait for a later time to use any of these tools." |
| Deepnote | Monthly AI calls, plus machine hours | Machine hours "replenish every month", but on Free the hardware "is turned off if their owner runs out of free quota and they don't have a paying method set up", and buying more is Team-and-above only. Free projects also stop "after running continuously for 8 hours". |
| Hex | Agent credits | A hard stop: "users will be blocked from submitting additional agent prompts." Grants "reset each billing cycle" and "do not rollover". Community's Small compute is priced at $0/hr, so compute itself is not the meter. |
| Wren AI (cloud) | 20 credits a month | "If you exceed the usage limits for your credits, you need to buy additional credits in the billing section." Unused free credits are lost each month. |
| Chat2DB (Community) | Nothing on the vendor's side | The card says "No AI calls included", so there is no vendor allowance to exhaust — you configure your own model and pay your own provider. No reset or hard-stop language is published on its pricing page. |
| Intellrise (us) | Nothing metered per question | We do not meter AI calls, because we do not supply the model — you connect your own provider key and your AI cost is your provider's bill. Our Free limits are structural instead: 1 data source, 3 dashboards, 1 seat. Hitting them blocks the next data source or dashboard, not the next question. |
Where these vendors' own pages disagree with themselves
This section exists because we kept finding the same thing: the plan card and the documentation do not match. None of these are accusations of bad faith — pricing pages get updated at a different cadence from docs, and a fast-moving product will drift. But if you are going to plan around a number, you should know which numbers are unstable.
- Julius AI — its billing docs say the Free plan's credits are "100 (one-time)" and "don't renew"; the pricing page's comparison table says the Free plan gets "Free daily credits". One-time and daily are not the same offer. Its Free-plan RAM also appears as "2 GB of RAM" on the pricing card while its containers doc lists 8 GB for "All plans".
- Julius AI — the pricing page's comparison table puts Postgres, BigQuery and Snowflake in the Plus column, while the Business card lists "Postgres, BigQuery, Snowflake + more data connectors" as something Business adds on top of Ultra. If a live database connection is the reason you are buying, this is the fact to confirm before you pay.
- ChatGPT — the file-uploads article says the capability is "Available now to all ChatGPT Plus, Pro, and ChatGPT Enterprise users" and then, in the same article, "Free users are limited to 3 file uploads per day." The pricing page's answer is a third one: File uploads "Limited" on Free.
- Deepnote — the Free card says "Unlimited Basic machines with 5 GB RAM, 2 vCPU", while the comparison grid on the same page labels the same thing "Free compute ($112/month worth)", and a docs page says Free hardware is switched off "if their owner runs out of free quota". Unlimited and a monthly-dollar-equivalent quota cannot both be right.
- Hex — the pricing grid gives Community "Limited" credits, but the credits documentation says "users on paid seats are awarded a monthly credit grant" and its Monthly Credit Grant table has no Community row at all. Its Community card also says "Notebook agent trial" while the grid ticks "Notebook agent" for Community with no qualifier.
- Wren AI — its Enterprise Cloud card lists "Custom LDAP/ AD & OIDC" as included, while the comparison table on the same page marks LDAP/AD and OIDC as "Add-on" for that tier. Its repository is also described three ways: the README says Apache 2.0, the LICENSE file says "WrenAI is multi-licensed", and GitHub's API reports the licence as "Other" / NOASSERTION.
- Chat2DB — the same tier is called "COMMUNITY" on the card and "the Free plan" in the FAQ below it; the free database limit is "16 Databases Only" on the pricing page and "30+ databases" in the README; and the trial is "a free 30-day trial" with "No payment information is required" in the FAQ, while the page's own subtitle describes a card-on-file trial where "your first payment will only occur after the 30-day free trial ends".
Two tools people expect to find here that publish no free tier
- AskYourDatabase — its pricing page lists only paid plans: a Desktop "Ultimate" plan showing $49.00 USD/monthly against a struck-through $69.99, and website-chatbot plans at $149 and $329/month plus a custom Enterprise. There is no free plan on that page. Its homepage does say "No credit card required, we have free quota of small model." — but no number, no plan name, and no reset rule is published for that quota anywhere we could read. Worth noting the pricing page has been carrying the notice "Only one week left before the price changes to $69!" for at least a week, so treat the promo clock as decoration rather than a deadline.
- Basedash — no free plan is listed. Its Startup plan is "$1,000/month + AI usage" for up to 25 users, and Enterprise is custom. What it does offer is a genuine evaluation path: "Start with a 14-day free trial, no credit card required", with full feature access. If you saw Basedash on a list of free AI analytics tools, that list was wrong.
What our own free tier does not do
We would rather you find this out here than after signing up.
- No CSV or Excel upload on Free. This is the big one, and it is the opposite trade-off from ChatGPT and Julius: our Free plan connects to a live database but will not take a file you drag in. File upload starts on Pro.
- One data source. Google Sheets is additional and does not count against it, but a second database means Pro.
- Three dashboards, and no dashboard customisation on Free — no drag/resize, no changing chart types or colours, no editing the generated SQL. You get what the AI builds.
- No AI Semantic Schema Learning on Free. The self-maintaining semantic layer is the thing that makes answers better as the tool learns your schema, and it is a Pro feature. On Free you can still edit the dbt schema and field descriptions by hand.
- No email delivery and no read-only share links on Free. One seat.
- You supply the AI. There is no bundled model on any of our plans — you connect your own provider key, and your AI spend is between you and that provider. That is cheaper at volume and it means we never hold your AI vendor relationship, but it does mean there is a setup step the all-in-one tools do not have. If you want somebody else's model included in the price, one of the tools above is a better fit than we are.
- And the honest comparison: every new account gets 14 days of Pro with no card, so you can test the paid behaviour before deciding. After 14 days you land on Free rather than losing access.
How to pick in five minutes
- Your data is a file someone sent you, and you want an answer today — ChatGPT Free or Julius AI Free. Mind Julius's one-time 100 credits, and that on Julius's free tier "Files are retained for up to 1 hour of inactivity".
- You write Python or SQL and want a notebook — Deepnote Free or Hex Community. Deepnote gives you more editors (3) but meters AI to single-digit calls per month; Hex gives you "Connect any data source" on Community, which Deepnote reserves for five specific engines.
- You want to self-host and pay nothing to a vendor — Wren AI's Open Source tier (CLI and engine, no UI) or Chat2DB Community (local, 16 or 30+ databases depending which of its pages you read). Both expect you to bring your own model.
- You have one database and want scheduled reports and dashboards from it without writing SQL — that is what our Free plan is shaped for, with the caveats in the section above.
- Whatever you shortlist, check one thing on the vendor's live pricing page before you invest a workflow in it: whether your specific database engine is ticked in the free column. That single cell moved between plans for three of the seven tools here.
Frequently asked questions
As published on 2026-08-01: Hex's Community plan ("Connect any data source"), Wren AI's cloud Free plan (Database & Data Warehouse Connectors ticked in the Free column), Wren AI's open-source edition, Chat2DB's Community edition, Intellrise's Free plan (one database plus Google Sheets), and Deepnote's Free plan for PostgreSQL, MySQL, ClickHouse, MariaDB and MindsDB only. ChatGPT's free plan and Julius AI's free plan do not list a SQL database connector on their free tiers — both work from files you upload or attach from Google Drive, OneDrive or SharePoint.
The plan itself costs $0, but its allowance does not renew. Julius's billing documentation says the Free plan gets "100 (one-time)" credits and that "The Free plan's 100 credits are a one-time grant and don't renew", and that "purchasing additional credits or topping up your balance is not supported." Its pricing page's comparison table says something different — "Free daily credits" — so check your own Usage page rather than either description. Read 2026-08-01.
Partly. OpenAI's pricing page marks Data analysis as "Limited" on Free and Interactive tables and charts as "No". The hard limits it publishes are three file uploads per day on Free, roughly 50MB for a spreadsheet, and a 27K context window for GPT Instant. There is no connector for your own SQL database, and the analysis sandbox "cannot make external web requests or API calls". Read 2026-08-01.
None of the seven state a card requirement for their free plan on their pricing page — which is not the same as promising there is none, so we report it as unstated rather than as "no card". Two vendors do say it explicitly for their paid-plan trials: Hex ("try the Hex Team plan free for 14 days, no payment card required") and Basedash ("14-day free trial, no credit card required"). Our own 14-day Pro trial takes no card.
Usually that it does not include the AI. Chat2DB's Community edition says "No AI calls included" and its comparison table marks Community as "Requires AI Configuration" — the feature works once you attach your own model key. Wren AI's open-source tier and our own plans work the same way: you bring your own provider key, so there is no vendor meter to run out of, and your cost is whatever your AI provider charges. It is cheaper at volume and more setup up front.
Not ours — our Free plan connects to a live database but does not accept CSV or Excel uploads, which start on Pro. For a file you were emailed, ChatGPT Free (three uploads a day, spreadsheets up to about 50MB) or Julius AI Free (.csv, .xlsx, .sav, with files retained up to one hour of inactivity) will get you an answer faster.
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