July 2026 was a tough month for developer free tiers. With 10 negative changes versus 1 positive, the trend continues toward tighter limits and eliminated offerings. Developers relying on free tiers should review their dependencies.
Roboflow's free Public plan went from "$60/mo free credits" to "15 credits / month" between the Internet Archive's 2026-06-23 and 2026-07-30 captures of its pricing page. Roboflow states no dollar value for a credit; its Core plan sells 50 credits for $99 a month. Source ↗
Cloudflare Workers AI (1 negative change: free tier limits reduced)
On 2026-07-28 Cloudflare took Kimi K2.6, Kimi K2.7 Code and GLM-5.2 off the Workers Free plan; they now need the Workers Paid plan (or, from 2026-08-07, prepaid AI Gateway credits). Source ↗
Exa (1 negative change: free tier limits reduced)
Between 2026-07-17 and 2026-07-24, Exa replaced its free tier of up to 20,000 requests a month with $10 of credits a month, plus $20 of credits on sign-up. Source ↗
Phase Two (1 negative change: free tier removed)
Phase Two shut down its free shared realms on 2026-07-30, 30 days after announcing it on 2026-06-30. Its cheapest plan is now the Starter cluster at $149 a month, with a 30-day free trial. Source ↗
Mercury paused its Google Cloud perk. mercury.com/perks/google-cloud offered "Google Cloud and Firebase costs covered up to $200,000 USD over 2 years" in the Internet Archive's capture of 2026-02-10 and said "Offer temporarily unavailable. New offer coming later this year" in the capture of 2026-07-02, as it does today. Source ↗
Cloudflare for Startups (1 negative change: free tier limits reduced)
Cloudflare replaced its startup programme's single Workers AI cap with caps by tier. The Internet Archive's capture of cloudflare.com/startups on 2026-07-01 says Workers AI is "Covered up to a $50,000 cap"; the capture of 2026-07-02 says "Covered up to a $2,500 cap for Tier 3, $25,000 for Tier 2, and $50,000 for Tier 1". Source ↗
Cerebras (1 negative change: free tier removed)
Cerebras's free access became a time- and credit-bounded trial for new accounts: $5 in credits after adding a verified payment method, expiring 30 days after they are granted. Cerebras says there is no permanently free tier; continued use needs a Pay as You Go purchase. Source ↗
Pollinations ended the free Pollen that refilled every hour on every account (0.01 to 0.4 Pollen an hour, by tier). Free Pollen now comes only from Quests, whose rewards are paid once and land as Quest Pollen; further use needs purchased Pollen. The change did not touch the keyless image and text endpoints, which Pollinations documents as the free Classic API. Source ↗
Groq shut down Llama 4 Scout and Qwen3 32B on its free and developer plans. Their model IDs were meta-llama/llama-4-scout-17b-16e-instruct and qwen/qwen3-32b, and Groq announced the shutdown on June 17. On the free plan Llama 4 Scout had allowed 30,000 tokens a minute and Qwen3 32B 60 requests a minute, each with 500,000 tokens a day. Groq named gpt-oss-120b as the replacement for Qwen3 32B, and gpt-oss-120b or Qwen3.6 27B for Llama 4 Scout. Source ↗
Vercel (1 negative change: paid pricing changed)
By July 20, 2026, new Vercel Pro and Enterprise accounts use Elastic build machines by default, which scale between 4 and 30 vCPUs and bill $0.0035 per CPU minute. From February 2026 the default for new Pro projects had been Turbo, billed at $0.126 a minute. Vercel now lists Turbo at $0.105 a minute and Standard at $0.014. Source ↗
Biggest Winners
Vendors that added or expanded free tiers
Amazon Kiro (1 positive change)
Kiro added a Pro Max plan at $100 per user a month with 5,000 credits, between Pro+ and Power. It first appears on kiro.dev/pricing between the 2026-06-03 and 2026-07-10 captures. Source ↗