Best New Free AI Tools This Week

Four genuinely free AI tools went into the directory this week: Teable for spreadsheets that have outgrown themselves, Framer for shipping a client site fast, Raycast for keyboard-driven work, and Open WebUI for running AI without sending a single prompt off your machine. None of them asks for a credit card. Every free limit below comes from the vendor's own pricing page rather than a press release, and the catch on each one is named up front.

A note on what made the cut. Plenty of things launched this week. Most were sales and marketing platforms with pricing that starts at a monthly fee, which is fine but not what this directory is for. These four survived because their free plans are permanent rather than trials, and because a freelancer or a small team in Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, or Manila can actually get value from them on day one.

Which Free Tool Replaces a Messy Shared Spreadsheet?

Teable, and it's the strongest addition this week. Teable 3.0 landed on Product Hunt's weekly leaderboard for the week of 20 July 2026, placing eighth with 460 upvotes.

Here's what makes it different from every other Airtable clone. Teable stores your data in PostgreSQL rather than a proprietary format, so the sheet your ops person edits every morning is also a real database your developer can query directly. You don't hit a wall the moment the business needs something the spreadsheet cannot do.

The free plan gives you 1,000 rows, 1GB of attachments, 200 credits, and 100 automation runs per seat, at zero cost. That row cap is the honest limit: it's fine for a client tracker or an inventory list, and too small for transaction history.

But the more interesting number is on GitHub. The Teable repository shows 21.6k stars and an AGPL-3.0 licence on the community edition, which means you can self-host the whole thing and skip the row cap entirely. For a business in the region whose client contracts say data stays in-country, that's the part that matters. You get the tool and you keep the server.

Best for: small teams whose shared spreadsheet has become load-bearing. Free tier: 1,000 rows, 1GB attachments, 200 credits, 100 automation runs, no card. Link: teable.ai.

Can You Build a Client Site Free With AI Agents?

Yes, up to a point, and the point is your domain name. Framer added AI Agents that work on the design canvas itself, writing copy, arranging layouts, and organising pages rather than just generating a template you then fight with.

Framer's pricing page puts the free plan at 500 credits to try, 1GB of bandwidth, and publishing on a free Framer subdomain, with no credit card to start. Those 500 credits are shared across the workspace and reset monthly, and they cover Agents and Localization.

Be realistic about the credits. Five hundred sounds generous until you let an Agent restructure a page three times. Treat it as enough to build one small site properly, not enough to run an agency on. The moment a client wants their own domain, you're on a paid plan, which is a fair trade rather than a bait and switch.

For freelancers this is still a good deal. You can take a brief on Monday, have something real to show on Tuesday, and only spend money once the client has said yes. If you are a freelancer weighing up the wider kit, our free AI tools for freelancers guide is the better starting point.

Best for: freelancers and small agencies shipping client landing pages. Free tier: 500 AI credits a month, 1GB bandwidth, Framer subdomain, no card. Link: framer.com.

What Changed for Raycast This Month?

It stopped being a Mac-only tool. Raycast is a keyboard launcher that puts commands, clipboard history, snippets, window management, and AI prompts behind one shortcut, and it now runs on Windows and iOS alongside Mac. That single change is what moves it from a niche recommendation to something you can suggest to a whole team.

Raycast's pricing page calls the free plan "Free, Forever" and includes core features, thousands of extensions, and 50 Raycast AI messages. No credit card.

Fifty AI messages a month is small, and it's worth saying plainly rather than burying it. You will not run your day's writing through Raycast on the free plan. What you will do is stop hunting through menus, and that alone is worth the install. The AI is a bonus on top of a genuinely good launcher, not the reason to use it.

There's a learning curve of about a week before the shortcuts become muscle memory. Push through it. The people who stick with keyboard launchers rarely go back.

Best for: anyone who works fast and hates reaching for a mouse. Free tier: core features and thousands of extensions free forever, plus 50 AI messages. Link: raycast.com.

How Do You Run AI Without Sending Data Anywhere?

You host it yourself, and Open WebUI is the cleanest way to do that in 2026. Its GitHub repository describes it as an extensible, feature-rich, and user-friendly self-hosted AI platform designed to operate entirely offline. That last phrase is the whole pitch.

You install it with pip, Docker, or Kubernetes, then point it at whatever model you want. It works with Ollama for fully local models and with any OpenAI-compatible API, including LMStudio, GroqCloud, Mistral, OpenRouter, and vLLM. The interface looks and behaves like the chat tools your team already knows, so nobody needs retraining.

Why this matters here specifically. A lot of small firms in the region hold client data they are contractually not allowed to put into a US-hosted chatbot, and the usual answer has been to ban AI outright. This is the alternative. Run it on a machine you control, connect a local model, and the confidentiality question stops being a question because nothing leaves the building.

The cost is your time. You are the one installing, updating, and keeping it running, and local models want decent hardware to feel quick. If your team already runs Docker for anything else, that cost is small. If nobody there has touched a container, budget properly for it. For everyday non-sensitive work, a hosted free tier from our free AI writing tools guide is still the faster route.

Best for: teams that cannot legally or contractually send data to a third party. Free tier: completely free and open source, no vendor account, no usage caps. Link: openwebui.com.

Which One Should You Try First?

Pick by the problem you actually have this week, not by which sounds most impressive.

• Your spreadsheet keeps breaking. Start with Teable. Ten minutes will tell you whether the 1,000 row cap works for your use case.
• A client needs a site by Friday. Framer. Build on the free plan and only pay when they approve the domain.
• You lose time hunting through apps. Raycast. Free forever, and the non-AI half is the useful half.
• You have data you cannot upload. Open WebUI, assuming somebody on the team is comfortable with Docker.

One habit worth building with any free tier. Check the limit before you commit real work to it, not after. Every number in this article came off a vendor pricing page in July 2026, and free tiers get quietly trimmed all the time. Our no-signup free AI tools guide tracks the ones that ask least of you, and the full directory now lists 117 tools with the free limits spelled out on each card.

What Else Do People Ask?

Are these AI tools actually free or just free trials?

All four have a permanent free plan, not a trial, and none asks for a credit card to start. Teable, Framer, and Raycast are freemium, so the free plan is capped and the vendor hopes you upgrade. Open WebUI is different: it is open source software you install yourself, so there is no vendor plan and no cap at all. The limits quoted here come from each vendor's own pricing page, checked in July 2026.

Which of these works best for a small business in Southeast Asia?

Teable, if you are running the business on shared spreadsheets that keep breaking. It gives you a real PostgreSQL database under a familiar sheet interface, and the community edition is AGPL-3.0 so you can self-host it on a server in your own country. That last part matters if client contracts or local rules say the data cannot sit overseas. Open WebUI solves the same residency problem for AI chat rather than data.

Do any of these run without creating an account?

Not quite, though Open WebUI comes closest. Teable, Framer, and Raycast all need a free account before you can use the AI features. Open WebUI needs no vendor account at all since you host it yourself, but it does ask you to create a local admin login on first run. If you want tools that need no account whatsoever, our no-signup guide covers those separately.

What happens when you run out of free AI credits?

The AI features stop and the rest of the tool keeps working. On Framer you still have the design canvas and can publish, you just cannot ask an Agent to do it for you. On Teable your data and automations are unaffected. Raycast keeps every non-AI command running. Credits reset monthly on Framer and Teable, so a quiet month rebuilds your allowance without paying.

Is a self-hosted AI tool worth the setup effort?

It depends on what your data is. For general drafting and research, a hosted free tier is faster to start and good enough. For client records, unreleased work, or anything covered by a confidentiality clause, self-hosting removes the question entirely because nothing leaves your machine. Open WebUI installs through pip, Docker, or Kubernetes, so if your team already runs Docker the setup is an afternoon, not a project.

Sources: Teable pricing and GitHub repository (AGPL-3.0, 21.6k stars); Framer pricing page; Raycast pricing page; Open WebUI GitHub repository; Product Hunt weekly leaderboard, week of 20 July 2026. Free tier details verified July 2026 and subject to change. Check each vendor directly before committing to a plan.