August 2026 was a tough month for developer free tiers. With 10 negative changes versus 2 positive, the trend continues toward tighter limits and eliminated offerings. Developers relying on free tiers should review their dependencies.
13
Total Changes +3 vs last month
10
Negative +1 vs last month
2
Positive +1 vs last month
1
Neutral
Changes by Type
Change Type
Count
Product Deprecated
3
Limits Reduced
3
Pricing Restructured
3
Limits Increased
2
Restriction
2
Biggest Losers
Vendors whose changes cost users more
Mistral AI (2 negative changes: new free-tier restriction; pricing changed)
Mistral's free API moved to a $10 monthly allowance shared across Studio, the API and Vibe Code; when it is used up, usage can stop unless pay-as-you-go is on. Before, the docs described a free API tier with restrictive rate limits, and the Free plan listed no API credit. Source ↗
Since 2026-08-05 Mistral's consumer terms exclude Mistral AI Studio and its API, which Mistral limits to business customers; API use falls under its Commercial Terms. Source ↗
Algolia replaced its Build plan with a Free plan between the pricing-page captures of 2026-08-10 and 2026-08-13; its Free Plan terms carry a new version from 2026-08-12. The free plan went from 1M records to 50K, and from 10K to 5K recommendation requests and 5K crawls a month; search requests stay at 10K a month. Source ↗
MiniMax (1 negative change: part of the product ends; the free tier narrows)
MiniMax closed its paid Music Generation and Lyrics Generation APIs to new users on 2026-08-20, and says its free music models (Music-3.0-free, Music-2.6-free, music-cover-free) will be discontinued, with no date given. M2.7 and Hailuo prices are unchanged. Source ↗
DeepSeek API (1 negative change: paid pricing changed)
At 16:00 UTC on 2026-08-16, DeepSeek introduced peak and off-peak pricing, with off-peak at half the peak rate. V4 Flash and V4 Pro output prices rose, with Flash from $0.28 to $1.32 at peak and Pro from $0.87 to $3.96 at peak. Source ↗
Groq shut down Llama 3.1 8B and Llama 3.3 70B on its free and developer plans. On the free plan Llama 3.1 8B had allowed 14,400 requests and 500,000 tokens a day; the free chat models left (gpt-oss-120b, gpt-oss-20b and a Qwen 27B model) allow 1,000 requests and 200,000 tokens a day each. Source ↗
Google Content API for Shopping (1 negative change: product ends; its free plan ends with it)
Google Content API for Shopping was sunset on 2026-08-18, and its requests have returned progressive errors since 2026-09-01. Google names the Merchant API, generally available since July 2025, as its successor; developers who need more time can apply for extended access. Source ↗
Cloudflare for Startups (1 negative change: free tier limits reduced)
Cloudflare cut Tier 2's Workers AI credit cap from $25,000 to $10,000. The Internet Archive's capture of cloudflare.com/startups on 2026-08-06 says "$25,000 for Tier 2"; the capture of 2026-08-07 says "$10,000 for Tier 2". Tier 3 kept $2,500 and Tier 1 kept $50,000. Source ↗
CertKit (1 negative change: new free-tier restriction)
CertKit renamed its free plan Homelab and limited it to personal, non-commercial use between 2026-07-15 and 2026-08-18. Its limits stayed at 2 certificates, 1 agent and 1 seat. Source ↗
From August 21, 2026, Anchor Browser bills each AI step by the tier of the model that runs it: $0.01 for Light models, $0.05 for Standard models such as Claude Haiku 4.5 and GPT-5, and $0.10 for High Performance models such as Claude Sonnet, Claude Opus and GPT-5.5. Before that date every AI step cost $0.01. With your own model key, a step is still a flat $0.01. Browser, browser-hour and proxy prices did not change. Source ↗
Biggest Winners
Vendors that added or expanded free tiers
Composio (1 positive change)
Composio's new pricing, for signups on or after 2026-08-15, raised the free plan from 20,000 tool calls a month (triggers counted inside them) to 100,000 tool calls and a separate 50,000 triggers a month, with 3 team members. Accounts from before 2026-08-15 keep the old plan through 2026-12-31. Source ↗
Amplitude (1 positive change)
Amplitude dropped the 10K MTU limit from its free plan between the Internet Archive's copies of its pricing page from 2026-06-08 and 2026-08-04: the Starter plan (10K MTUs, up to 2M events) became a Free plan of 2M events a month. Source ↗
Deprecations and Other Changes
Changes counted as neither negative nor positive, such as products and models retired or closed to new users
OpenAI (product deprecated 2026-08-26)
Assistants API deprecated, full shutdown August 26, 2026. Developers must migrate to Responses API + Conversations API Source ↗