… The free tier just kept giving me more to work with than I anticipated - everything from building interactive apps to full-on Google ecosystem integration. At some point I barely noticed the difference between Gemini free and ChatGPT paid. …
… For one full week, I stripped away every paid AU subscription and lived entirely on free tiers. …
… When I replaced one paid service with a free, self-hosted alternative, and it worked fine, I started questioning every other monthly renewal I had. The most expensive subscriptions in my stack were Google One and Apple One. …
… This doesn't need the paid tiers of either tool, so shelling out $20 per month seemed overkill. …
… Better packaging still does not excuse worse clarity Paying more should make the product easier The problem isn’t that paid tiers exist. …
… Basically, if you want your app to look anything like a real product, you're gonna have to get a paid tier. …
… I could finally connect it to Figma The connector only works in the paid tiers I’ve been using Figma alongside Claude for several months, but it was more of a tool-hopping situation. …
… Bolt has paid tiers starting at $25/month that remove the daily cap and bump you up to 10 million tokens, but I shouldn't need to pay just to get a camera to turn on! …
… So the key is to pick only what you actually need, and stick to the free tiers on the rest. At least, that's how I've been approaching it. …
… Google's new Notebooks feature, which rolled out earlier last week to paid Google Pro subscribers, connects Gemini and NotebookLM in a way that sounds simple on paper: sources sync between the two apps, and notebooks you create in one appear in the other automatically. …