These 5 Free AI Tools Save Me Tons of Money on Subscriptions

The technological marvel of AI offers free alternatives to expensive software and subscriptions. But just where can you make savings? From writing and note-taking to PDF and transcription, here are the tools that regularly save me money.

Creating bespoke images or sourcing stock images was always time-consuming and/or costly for me. I was constantly sourcing or creating images to accompany my work. I now use the free version of Leonardo.AI to create much of my artwork.

The process is simple, and the free version offers options such as contrast, dimensions, and preset styles.

How Leonardo.AI Saves Me Money

• The free version is restricted to 150 tokens per day. As a rule of thumb, a single generated image with no changes will cost 24 tokens.
• The Leonardo.AI free version restricts you to the small and medium resolution options. However, it still allows you to create images at 1376×768, which is a healthy enough resolution for most purposes.
• A selection of up to four images for each prompt.

This has saved me money in two ways. First, the time spent creating, editing, or sourcing images can quickly mount up. Leonardo.AI quickens the whole process and substantially reduces the editing required. It also saves money on stock image subscriptions like Shutterstock or Adobe Stock.

2

ChatGPT: A Free Writing Assistant

It’s impossible to write such a list without mentioning ChatGPT. As a writing assistant, this is an incredibly powerful tool and the free version will be more than adequate for all but the most ardent wordsmiths. Although it can do so, as a writer, I don’t rely on ChatGPT to generate entire articles. But that doesn’t diminish its value as a writing assistant, and the free version works perfectly in such a role.

If you spend an inordinate amount of time pondering how to word an awkward email or a compelling social media post, the free version of ChatGPT will help.

How ChatGPT Saves Me Money

• The free version uses the GPT-4o model, offering a range of tasks, from refining text to generating quick creative ideas.
• Free users are restricted to using the GPT-4o mini version only a limited number of times within a five-hour window. After this, the free version uses the still useful but not quite as powerful GPT-4o mini version. However, the company is coy about revealing just how limited this number is.
• ChatGPT’s free version doesn’t include advanced features like file uploads or the ability to browse the internet, but it remains a powerful tool for drafting and brainstorming.

Similar to Leonardo.AI, ChatGPT has saved me money in two ways. It can save time on tasks like simplifying information or finding new ideas. However, it also saves money on paid tiers like OpenAI’s ChatGPT Plus or alternatives like Claude.

While tools like ChatGPT are great for getting ideas down on paper, their work really stops there. This is where onboard grammar checkers come into play. There are plenty of free spelling and grammar checkers to choose from and they all do their job fairly well.

My preference is LanguageTool. I use the free version, which is adequate for all my writing needs and outperforms the premium versions of many of the alternatives.

How LanguageTool Saves Me Money

• LanguageTool has plugins and apps for browsers, office apps, and email clients.
• The free version has a grammar checker, a spell checker, and a paraphrasing tool.
• Word documents can be uploaded and checked online.

First, a confession. Despite working in IT and as a writer, my typing skills remain dreadful. In this sense, LanguageTool saves me money simply by autocorrecting much of my inept typing and saving me time on editing. Because the free version is more than adequate, I also save money on premium versions of similar tools.

Otter AI is a transcription tool that can capture and organize spoken content. As a remote worker, this is incredibly useful to me. Otter AI generates real-time, searchable transcripts and integrates with most collaboration and productivity tools.

While the free version doesn’t have all the bells and whistles of the paid tier, it’s still a powerful tool with plenty of functionality.

How Otter AI Saves Me Money

• It integrates with tools such as Zoom, Slack, Office 365, and Google. However, the premium version is required for integration with other apps, including Dropbox.
• The free version allows up to 300 minutes of transcription per month with a limit of 30 minutes per recording.
• Otter AI Chat can be used to ask questions about the details of your transcripts. For instance, I could ask, ”What is the due date for the AI article?” and Otter Chat will do the searching for me.

Using Otter AI has eliminated the need for costly paid transcription services. It also saves me time spent manually taking notes, summarizing meetings, and ensuring I don’t forget important points.

The ubiquitous PDF file has been around for decades. Despite being a widely used format, PDFs can still be difficult to work with without paying for an application like Adobe Acrobat. PDF Gear is an app that addresses this but takes it further. Not only can PDFGgear let you create and edit PDFs for free, but it also has an integrated AI Copilot.

As well as acting as a help assistant for the program, the ChatGPT-based Copilot can also provide insights into documents. For instance, you can ask it to summarize PDFs or even translate them into different languages.

How PDFGear Saves Me Money

• Fully featured free PDF toolkit with editing, merging, and signing functions.
• Integrated chatbot for efficient working.
• OCR capabilities can convert scanned PDFs into TXT or Word documents with support for over thirty languages.

Apart from time-saving functions like summarizing large documents, the main cost-saving is avoiding the cost of subscriptions to suites like Adobe Acrobat.

These five free AI tools offer powerful functionality without breaking the bank. Depending on your usage, these alternatives to premium AI tools can reduce those costly subscriptions without affecting your productivity or creativity.