Is Julius AI free? Not for your database. Intellrise is, and Pro is $29

Is Julius AI free? The short answer

• The free plan costs $0, and the size of the grant depends on which Julius page you read. Its billing FAQ says free users "receive a one-time grant of 100 credits when they sign up; these credits don't renew"; the credits table on that same page said "25 welcome bonus + 25 daily credits" when we re-read it on 13 August 2026, and still said it on 28 August 2026. Both are quoted in full further down.
• Credits do not roll over and cannot be topped up. Asked whether unused credits roll over, Julius answers "No. Unused credits expire at the end of your billing cycle and don't carry over." On buying more: "At the moment, purchasing additional credits or topping up your balance is not supported."
• There is no free trial of the paid tiers. The words "trial", "free trial" and "credit card" do not appear anywhere on the Julius pricing page — we checked the rendered page and the underlying data payload. The free plan is the trial.
• You cannot connect a database on Free. The pricing comparison table's Data connectors row lists "Google Drive, OneDrive, Sharepoint" for Free; Snowflake, BigQuery and Postgres appear only from Plus upward.
• Four of the headline features are "Limited" on Free rather than included. Reading the pricing comparison table on 6 September 2026, the Free column says "Limited" for AI Presentation Maker, AI Image Generator, AI Video Generator and Build Websites with AI, while all four carry a tick in every paid column; Scheduled Runs is not offered on Free or Plus at all and starts at 3 on Pro. Julius does not publish what "Limited" amounts to, so it is one more thing you can only size by spending the grant.
• Uploaded files are deleted after an hour of inactivity. Julius's file documentation is explicit: free-tier files are "retained for up to 1 hour of inactivity, after which all uploaded and AI-generated files are deleted". Paid users get 7 days.
• Julius no longer counts messages at all. If you have read an older comparison quoting a monthly message cap for Julius, it is out of date — the docs now say "Instead of counting messages, Julius now measures usage in credits."

Where Julius's own pages disagree about the free plan

This is the part worth reading slowly, because it is the reason the free plan is hard to research. Julius maintains a marketing pricing page and a separate documentation site, and the table below puts the same five questions to both. When we first ran it on 3 August 2026, four of the five came back with two different answers. When we ran it again on 28 August 2026, two of those four had been reconciled, one had changed its numbers on us, and one was unchanged. If you are deciding whether the free plan is enough for you, you should know which number you are trusting, and you should know how fast that answer moves.

The three limits that actually decide it

Credit counts are the headline, but in practice three other constraints determine whether the free plan can do your job.

• No live data connection. The free plan reads files from Google Drive, OneDrive and Sharepoint. If your data lives in Postgres, MySQL, Snowflake or BigQuery, the free plan cannot reach it — that capability starts on Plus at $20/mo ($16/mo billed yearly). For anyone evaluating an AI analyst against a real warehouse, this is usually the deciding line rather than the credit count.
• Files vanish after an hour idle. Because free-tier files are deleted after an hour of inactivity, the free plan does not support coming back to yesterday's analysis. It supports one sitting, which rules out recurring reporting.
• The grant is small, and you cannot price it in advance. On the one-time reading there is no steady state at all; on the 25-a-day reading there is one, but it is a low daily ceiling rather than a budget you can save up, because credits do not roll over and cannot be topped up. Either way Julius does not publish a per-action credit price — its FAQ says directly that there is "no single answer" because cost depends on the message complexity and which tools are invoked — so you cannot convert the grant into a number of questions in advance. You find out by spending it. One wrinkle before you plan on buying your way out: the same billing page that says top-ups are not supported also carries a refund clause governing them, word for word — "Credits are non-refundable, whether you bought them as a top-up or received them through your subscription" (julius.ai/docs/billing/credits-overview, read 28 August 2026). So the page cannot tell you whether top-ups are coming back, and if your plan for running dry is "buy a few more", ask a human at Julius first. On the Intellrise free tier there is no grant to top up and nothing to run out of on the Intellrise side: Intellrise sets no question cap, and model tokens are billed by your AI provider.

What $0 buys on the Intellrise side

The question that brought you here is whether free is enough to do your work, and you cannot answer it by reading one vendor's free column. So here is the same accounting for the Intellrise free tier, at the same level of detail.

One framing note before the list, because it decides which of these two is even relevant to you. Julius's free plan is built around files: you bring a spreadsheet, it reads it, and the meter counts what you spend. The Intellrise free tier is built around a connection: you point it at a database, and there is no meter. If your data already lives in a database, that is the shape you want.

• One live database, and it can be a real one. The Intellrise free tier connects a single data source, and that source may be PostgreSQL, MySQL or Redshift. Google Sheets is not counted against that one at all, and not as a second slot either: Intellrise excludes Sheets from the source quota entirely, with no separate cap on how many you connect. So a database plus however many Sheets you need is a free-tier configuration, and this is the one route by which mixed work — a client who gives you database access and two who email you spreadsheets — fits on $0, provided you are willing to land the spreadsheets in Sheets rather than upload the files. This is the line the two products draw in different places: Julius gates live database connectors at Plus, $20/mo, while on Intellrise the connection is the thing the free tier is for.
• No credit meter, because there is nothing to meter. Intellrise does not resell model capacity, so there is no allowance to run down, no top-up to buy and no counter in the corner of the screen; model tokens are billed by your AI provider at its list price. The usage endpoint in the product returns no limit at all rather than a number you are counting down from.
• Every export format, on the free tier. CSV, Excel, PDF, PowerPoint and Word. The export route carries no plan check at all, so a free Intellrise account produces the same files a paying one does. For a lot of freelance and consulting work the deliverable is the whole job, and this is the limit that usually bites first elsewhere.
• AI report editing is on the free tier. Asking the assistant to rewrite a section of a generated report is guarded by a feature flag that is switched on for every tier, free included.
• No trial cliff, because the free tier is not a trial. An Intellrise free account does not expire, does not ask for a card and does not convert into anything at the end of a period. The fourteen-day Pro trial sits alongside it rather than replacing it: decline the trial and you are on the same Intellrise free tier you started on, with the same one live database and the same exports. That matters here because what you are really comparing is not two free plans but two evaluation paths — one where the allowance runs out and one where it does not. On Intellrise, outgrowing free is a decision you make, not a balance hitting zero.
• Schema reading is not sampled down. Intellrise walks every table and every column the connection exposes rather than taking the first N, so a wide database does not get silently truncated on the way in. On PostgreSQL that includes ordinary tables, partitioned parents, views and materialized views, so reporting logic that lives in a view is read too.
• Three dashboards, and reports are not rationed by the month. The free tier caps dashboards at three; it does not put a monthly ceiling on how many questions you ask or reports you generate, because there is no unit to ration.

What the free plan does include

On 28 August 2026 the Free card lists exactly three key features, quoted verbatim: "Create presentations, reports, websites, images, and video", "File storage formats" (tooltip: "Upload .csv, .xlsx, .sav"), and "Google Drive data connector". That is a different card from the one we quoted here on 3 August 2026, which listed "Access to Notebooks" and "2 GB of RAM": on 28 August 2026 the strings Notebooks, RAM and 2 GB return zero matches anywhere on that page, and Julius's own documentation now says, word for word, "Notebooks have been sunset" (julius.ai/docs/notebooks-sunset, read 28 August 2026). The change is the point: the free tier you evaluated in July is not the free tier you would sign up for today, and Julius's pricing page carries no date of its own to warn you.

The other shape of free: no credit meter

Intellrise's free tier is built on a different model, and the difference is worth understanding before you compare the two, because it changes what "free" means rather than just how much of it you get.

There is no credit meter on any Intellrise plan, free or paid. Intellrise does not resell model capacity, so there is nothing to ration: you add a key from an AI provider once — Gemini, OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepSeek, MiniMax or any OpenAI-compatible endpoint; a free Gemini key takes about a minute — and that provider bills the tokens at its list price.

The free tier connects one data source, and that source can be a live database: PostgreSQL, MySQL or Redshift, plus Google Sheets which does not count against the one. That is the main practical difference from Julius's free plan — a live warehouse connection is the thing Julius gates and we do not.

The test that settles it: one misleading column

What decides this is not the credit count. It is whether the tool reads your schema the way your business does: a status integer where 3 means refunded, a gmv column that already includes tax. Read the obvious way, it quietly produces a number you then send to somebody.

Intellrise learns what those columns mean once, and every question after that uses the same definitions. On Julius that semantic layer is a Business-plan feature at $450 a month; on Intellrise it comes with Pro at $29. Connect your database free, ask the question that depends on your most misleading column, and check the answer against a number you already know.