Free AI data analysis tools: which free plans connect a real database
Updated 2026-09-26
Julius AI's and ChatGPT's free plans stop at files. Intellrise Free is $0 with a live database connection plus Google Sheets, three dashboards and no cap on your questions from us.
Below are the free tiers of seven tools, with each allowance quoted from the vendor's own pricing page or documentation, read on 1 August 2026. When you outgrow a free plan, Intellrise Pro is $29 a month and a team of five pays $100.
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.
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 or Redshift, 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 give two numbers on one page: the credits table reads "25 welcome bonus + 25 daily credits" while the FAQ says free users "receive a one-time grant of 100 credits when they sign up". The pricing page's comparison table instead puts "Free daily credits" in the Free column with no number. It no longer states any RAM figure — RAM and GB return zero matches on the whole page. File intake is ".csv, .xlsx, .sav". All read 28 August 2026. | 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 | 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/Word), AI report editing and custom instructions, with no question cap. Runs on an AI key you add once (a free Gemini key works). 1 seat. CSV and Excel upload on Pro. | 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 | A small credit grant on Free, sized differently on different Julius pages | Its FAQ says "a one-time grant of 100 credits when they sign up; these credits don't renew", while the credits table on that same page said "25 welcome bonus + 25 daily credits" on 13 August 2026. Under either reading 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 | Nothing metered per question | No question cap and no credits: model tokens are billed by your AI provider. Free limits are structural instead: 1 data source, 3 dashboards, 1 seat. Hitting them blocks the next data source or dashboard, never the next question. |
Where these vendors' own pages disagree with themselves
Across these vendors, the plan card and the documentation often do not match. If you are going to plan around a number, you should know which numbers are unstable.
- Julius AI — on one billing page the credits table reads "25 welcome bonus + 25 daily credits" while the FAQ below it says free users "receive a one-time grant of 100 credits when they sign up"; the pricing page's comparison table says only "Free daily credits". One-time and daily are not the same offer, and the number itself is not settled either. The RAM disagreement we reported here in August is gone: the pricing page no longer states any RAM figure at all, leaving the containers doc's "8 GB" for "All plans" as the only published number. All read 28 August 2026.
- Julius AI — the pricing page's comparison table puts Postgres, BigQuery and Snowflake in the Plus column at $20/mo, while the Business card at $450/mo lists "Postgres, BigQuery, Snowflake + more data connectors" as something Business adds on top of Ultra (both re-read 28 August 2026, both unchanged). 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 at $49 per seat per month (re-read 26 September 2026), 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.
- 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 offers instead is a trial: "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 Intellrise Free includes, and what Pro adds
- Free, $0: one live database — PostgreSQL, MySQL or Redshift — plus Google Sheets, which never counts against it; three dashboards with unlimited charts; unlimited reports and every export format; hand-edited dbt schema and field descriptions; and no question cap.
- Pro, $29 a month: CSV and Excel upload, unlimited data sources and dashboards with full customisation, the AI semantic layer that annotates your schema on connect and keeps the corrections you make, read-only share links, and scheduled email reports.
- Team, $100 a month: five seats in one shared workspace, and $20 a month for each seat after that.
- Every plan runs on an AI key you add once; a free Gemini key takes about a minute, and the provider bills its tokens directly.
- Every new account gets 14 days of Pro with no card, then lands on Free rather than losing access.
How to pick in five minutes
- Your data lives in a database — rule out ChatGPT Free and Julius AI Free first: neither free tier connects a Postgres or MySQL you host yourself, and Julius deletes free-tier files after an hour of inactivity.
- You have one database and want dashboards and exportable reports from it without writing SQL — that is what Intellrise Free is built for. If you want a report that arrives every Monday without anyone opening the app, scheduled email delivery is on Pro at $29.
- 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 gives two answers on one page: the credits table says "25 welcome bonus + 25 daily credits" and the FAQ under it says free users "receive a one-time grant of 100 credits when they sign up; these credits don't renew". The same page says "purchasing additional credits or topping up your balance is not supported". Its pricing page's comparison table says something different again — "Free daily credits" — so check your own Usage page rather than any of these descriptions. Read 28 August 2026.
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, and the analysis sandbox "cannot make external web requests or API calls" (read 2026-08-01). On databases, ChatGPT's plugin directory at chatgpt.com/plugins, read 15 August 2026, lists Neon Postgres ("Manage Neon Postgres databases"), Supabase ("Manage and query databases") and BigQuery ("Query and manage BigQuery resources"). So reaching your database from ChatGPT depends on who hosts it. If it is on Neon, Supabase or BigQuery there is a first-party route; if it is a Postgres a contractor stood up on a VPS somewhere, no entry in that directory covers it, and we found no Snowflake entry there on that date either.
None of the seven state a card requirement for their free plan on their pricing page. 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 Intellrise work the same way: you add a provider key once (a free Gemini key takes about a minute), so there is no vendor meter to run out of, and your cost is whatever your AI provider charges.
For spreadsheets you keep in Google Sheets, Intellrise Free connects them at $0, and Sheets never count against its one database source. CSV and Excel upload comes with Pro at $29 a month, and every new account starts with 14 days of Pro, no card. By contrast ChatGPT Free allows three file uploads a day, and Julius AI Free deletes uploaded files after one hour of inactivity.
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