How many free credits does Julius give you, and do they renew?

One hundred, once. Julius's credits documentation says free users "receive a one-time grant of 100 credits when they sign up; these credits don't renew". They also do not roll over — asked directly whether unused credits roll over, Julius answers "No. Unused credits expire at the end of your billing cycle and don't carry over." And they cannot be extended by purchase: "At the moment, purchasing additional credits or topping up your balance is not supported." So the free plan has one budget with no refill mechanism of any kind.

How many questions is 100 credits?

Julius does not publish a per-action credit price, and says so explicitly — its billing FAQ answers that there is no single answer because the cost depends on the complexity of the message and which tools it invokes. A quick question costs far less than a multi-step analysis that pulls data, runs code and produces a deliverable. Julius names model choice as one of the biggest drivers, with its faster in-house models consuming credits far more slowly than frontier ones. The only way to know your own rate is to watch the Usage page as you spend.

Can you connect a database on the Julius free plan?

No. On the pricing page's comparison table, the Data connectors row shows "Google Drive, OneDrive, Sharepoint" for the Free column, while Plus, Pro and Business add Snowflake, BigQuery and Postgres. So the free plan reads files from cloud storage, not live databases. Julius's own connector documentation lists PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQL Server, Snowflake, BigQuery, Databricks, Supabase and Vertica but does not state a plan requirement on those pages — the pricing table is the only Julius source that addresses the gating, so that is what we are citing. Read 3 August 2026.

Does Julius AI have a free trial of its paid plans?

Not one that it advertises on its pricing page. We searched the rendered page and the underlying data payload on 3 August 2026: the strings "trial", "free trial" and "credit card" return zero occurrences. The free plan itself is the evaluation path. For comparison, Intellrise offers a 14-day Pro trial with no card, and the account drops to the free tier afterwards rather than expiring.

What happens to your files on the Julius free plan?

They are deleted after an hour of inactivity. Julius's file documentation states that for free-tier users, files "are retained for up to 1 hour of inactivity, after which all uploaded and AI-generated files are deleted", while paid users keep files for up to 7 days of inactivity. Separately, the docs note that all containers, free and paid, spin down after an hour of inactivity. In practice this means the free plan supports a single working session rather than an analysis you return to.

Which AI models can you use on the Julius free plan?

Julius's two pages disagree here, so we will give you both. The model-selector documentation marks "Julius 1.2 Lite" as available on "All plans" and marks every other model — including GPT-5.5, the Claude models, Grok and Kimi — as "Paid plans". The pricing page's comparison table instead shows the Free column as "All Julius Models, GPT 5.5, Claude Sonnet 4.6, Opus 4.7", which is the same text it shows for Plus. The docs page carries a caveat that plan availability can change and to check workspace settings, which is the safest advice we can pass on.

Does Julius still have a monthly message limit?

No, and this is the most common piece of stale information about Julius. Its documentation says plainly: "Instead of counting messages, Julius now measures usage in credits." Any comparison quoting a fixed number of messages per month on a Julius plan is describing a retired model. Julius's own site has not fully caught up either — its service-description FAQ page was still live on 3 August 2026 describing Plus as providing "250 messages" and Pro as offering "unlimited messages", alongside a "Team plan at $50 per month per seat" that no longer appears on the pricing page.

What is the catch with a bring-your-own-key free tier?

That you have to bring a key. With Intellrise there is no credit meter and no per-question markup on any plan, so the free tier is not rationed the way a platform-key free tier has to be — but you must create an account with an AI provider and paste in a key before the product can answer anything, because there is no platform key fallback on any tier. You then pay that provider directly for tokens at list price. It is predictable and you control the model, but it is a slower start than signing up somewhere that includes the model, and at very low volume an included quota can cost you less.

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The Julius AI free plan: what 100 one-time credits actually get you

Updated 2026-08-03

If you are searching for the Julius AI free plan, you are almost certainly asking one question: can I actually get my work done without paying? The honest answer, from Julius's own documentation, is that the free plan is not a plan you live on. It is a one-time grant of 100 credits that never renews. Once you spend them, the free tier has nothing left to give you, and the next step is a paid plan.

That is not obvious from the pricing page. The pricing page's comparison table describes the Free column's credits as "Free daily credits", which reads like a recurring daily allowance. The billing documentation says something different and more specific: "The Free plan's 100 credits are a one-time grant and don't renew." Both pages were live on the day we wrote this. We show you both, quote them exactly, and let you decide which to plan around — but we would plan around the docs, because they carry the number.

This guide covers what the free plan includes, the three limits that catch people out, where Julius's own pages disagree with each other, and where Julius's free plan is genuinely the better choice than ours. Every Julius figure below was read from a Julius-owned page on 3 August 2026 and is footnoted with its source. If you want the full cost breakdown across all the paid tiers instead, read our Julius AI pricing guide.

The short answer

The free plan costs $0 and gives a one-time grant of 100 credits. Julius's billing docs state it twice: the credits-by-plan table lists Free as "100 (one-time)", and the FAQ says free users "receive a one-time grant of 100 credits when they sign up; these credits don't renew".
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.
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 on four points about the free tier they do not say the same thing. We are not claiming either page is dishonest — docs and marketing pages drift apart at every company, including ours. But if you are deciding whether the free plan is enough for you, you should know which number you are trusting.

Question	julius.ai/pricing says	Julius docs say
How many free credits?	The Credits row for Free reads "Free daily credits" — no number given anywhere on the page	"Free — 100 (one-time)", and "The Free plan's 100 credits are a one-time grant and don't renew"
Do they recur?	"daily" implies a recurring allowance; "Daily refresh credits" is separately listed as a feature of the paid cards only	They do not recur. "these credits don't renew"
How much memory?	"2 GB of RAM" on the Free card and in the System memory row	The Standard container is "8 GB" and is marked "All plans"
Which models on Free?	The Models row shows Free as "All Julius Models, GPT 5.5, Claude Sonnet 4.6, Opus 4.7" — identical to the Plus column	Only "Julius 1.2 Lite" is marked "All plans". Every other listed model, including GPT-5.5 and the Claude models, is marked "Paid plans"
What is the metering unit?	The word "message" does not appear on the pricing page at all	"Instead of counting messages, Julius now measures usage in credits"

Read on 3 August 2026 from julius.ai/pricing, julius.ai/docs/billing/credits-overview, julius.ai/docs/get-started/containers and julius.ai/docs/get-started/model-selector. Quotations are verbatim. A third Julius page, julius.ai/faq/service-description, was also live that day still describing the retired message model — "Our Plus plan, priced at $20 per month, provides 250 messages" and a "Team plan at $50 per month per seat" — and does not mention the free tier at all.

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. That is a reasonable design for a trial and a poor one for recurring reporting.
The grant is finite and unrepeatable. With 100 one-time credits, no rollover and no top-up, there is no steady state. 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 100 credits into a number of questions in advance. You find out by spending them.

What the free plan does include

It is a genuinely capable free tier for the file-first use case, and it is worth being precise about that rather than dismissive. The Free card lists exactly four key features, quoted verbatim: "Access to Notebooks", "File storage formats" (tooltip: "Upload .csv, .xlsx, .sav"), "Google Drive data connector", and "2 GB of RAM". The comparison table adds that the Free column has Notebooks and AI custom settings, and accepts ".csv, .xlsx, .sav" file intake.

Notebooks on a free plan is a real thing to have — an editable, repeatable cell-based workflow surface, which we do not offer at all at any price. And .sav is SPSS, which matters if you are coming from academic or survey research; we do not read that format either.

The other shape of free: bring your own key

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. You supply your own AI provider key — Gemini, OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepSeek, MiniMax or any OpenAI-compatible endpoint — and you pay that provider directly for tokens at their list price. We do not resell model capacity, so there is nothing for us to ration. Your ceiling is whatever your own provider account allows, and you choose the model, which is the single biggest lever on cost.

The free tier connects one data source, and that source can be a live database: PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQL Server, BigQuery, Snowflake, Databricks 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.

On the free plan	Julius	Intellrise
Recurring allowance	100 credits, one-time, does not renew; no rollover, no top-up	No credit meter. You pay your own AI provider directly for tokens
Live database connection	Not included. Data connectors row lists Google Drive, OneDrive, Sharepoint; Snowflake, BigQuery and Postgres start on Plus	One data source, which can be PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQL Server, BigQuery, Snowflake, Databricks or Redshift — plus Google Sheets, uncounted
File upload	Included: .csv, .xlsx, .sav	Not on Free. File upload (CSV/Excel) is listed on Pro
File retention	Deleted after 1 hour of inactivity (paid: 7 days)	Not applicable — the free tier reads a live connected source rather than storing uploads
Notebooks	Included on Free	Not offered on any plan
Models	Docs mark only Julius 1.2 Lite as available on all plans; frontier models are marked paid	Any model your own key can reach, including frontier models, on the free tier
Trial of the paid tier	None offered; "trial" does not appear on the pricing page	14-day Pro trial, no card. The free tier remains after it lapses

Julius figures read 3 August 2026 from julius.ai/pricing, julius.ai/docs/billing/credits-overview and julius.ai/docs/get-started/files. Intellrise figures from intellrise.com/pricing on the same date. Julius's docs do not state whether database connectors are plan-gated; the gating shown here is from the pricing page's comparison table, which is the only Julius source that addresses it.

Where Julius's free plan is the better choice

We would rather you pick the right tool than pick ours, so here is the honest version. If any of these describe you, Julius's free plan will serve you better than ours will, and you should take it.

Your data is a spreadsheet on your laptop. Julius's free plan accepts .csv, .xlsx and .sav uploads. Ours does not — file upload sits on our Pro plan, so a free Intellrise account cannot open your file at all.
You want to ask a question in the next five minutes. Julius runs on its own platform key, so you sign up and type. Every Intellrise plan is bring-your-own-key with no platform fallback, which means you must go and create a key with an AI provider before you can ask a single question. That is real friction and we are not going to pretend otherwise.
You want a notebook. Julius includes Notebooks on the free plan. We have no notebook feature at any price.
You work in SPSS. Julius reads .sav. We read CSV and Excel.
You need it for one afternoon. A one-time grant of 100 credits is a perfectly good fit for a single evaluation sitting, which is what it is designed for.

What our free tier does not do

For symmetry, the limits on our side, so you are not surprised after signing up.

You must bring your own AI provider key. There is no platform key fallback on any tier, including paid ones. Without a key, the product cannot answer anything.
Bring-your-own-key is not free. You pay your provider for tokens. It is charged at their list price with no markup from us and it is predictable and linear, but it is not zero, and at very low volume a vendor's included quota can genuinely be cheaper.
One data source on Free, and three dashboards. Multiple sources, unlimited dashboards, SQL editing and share links are on Pro at $29/mo ($24/mo billed annually).
No file upload on Free, no notebooks at any tier, no .sav support, no Slack agent, and no public API.
The Team plan is not shipped yet — it is listed as coming, not available.

Frequently asked questions

There is a free plan at $0, but it is a one-time allowance rather than an ongoing one. Julius's billing documentation lists the Free plan as "100 (one-time)" credits and states that "The Free plan's 100 credits are a one-time grant and don't renew." Once those credits are used, the free plan has no further allowance and continuing means moving to a paid plan. Note that the pricing page's comparison table describes the Free column's credits as "Free daily credits", which reads differently; the docs are the page that carries an actual number. Read from julius.ai on 3 August 2026.

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Every new account starts on a 14-day Pro trial with no card. After it lapses, the free tier stays free.