Best New Free AI Tools This Week

There is a pattern in this week's four additions, and it is worth naming up front: none of them is a chatbot. Every one of them is software that does work while you are looking somewhere else, or software that runs on your own hardware instead of somebody else's.

That is a shift from where free AI was two years ago. The free tier used to mean a slightly worse chat window. It increasingly means an agent with a daily allowance, or an open source runtime with no allowance at all because there is no server to pay for.

As always, every free tier number below comes from the vendor's own documentation rather than a press release or a roundup. Where a tool is narrower than its marketing suggests, that is stated plainly. One of this week's four has a catch big enough that we put it in the headline of its own section.

What are the new free AI tools this week?

The short version before the detail:

• Jules, Google's asynchronous coding agent. Free plan gives 15 tasks per rolling 24 hours with 3 running at once. Best for routine repository work.
• Cline, an open source coding agent for VS Code and the terminal. The agent is free, the model calls are not. Best if you already hold an API key.
• Ollama, which downloads and runs open weight models on your own machine. Local usage has no limits and no cost. Best for work that must stay private.
• n8n, workflow automation that can call AI models on a schedule. The self-hosted Community Edition is free. The cloud version is not.

Three of the four sit in the coding category, which is where the most movement has been this quarter. The fourth is a productivity tool that happens to require a terminal.

Is Google Jules free, and what do you actually get?

Jules is the most interesting of the four because it does something a chat window structurally cannot. You give it a GitHub repository and a task, and it goes away. It clones the repo, writes a plan, makes the change using Gemini models, and comes back with a pull request. You review a diff, not a wall of suggested code you have to paste somewhere.

The free plan is real. Google's Jules usage limits documentation lists 15 tasks per rolling 24 hours and 3 concurrent tasks with no payment required, and describes that tier as being for evaluating Jules on real work. The paid tiers are not separate subscriptions. Jules in Pro comes with a Google AI Pro plan at 100 tasks a day, and Jules in Ultra with a Google AI Ultra plan at 300 tasks a day.

Fifteen tasks a day sounds thin until you consider what a task is. This is not fifteen messages. It is fifteen jobs, each of which might be a dependency bump across a repository or a missing test suite for a module. Most solo developers will not touch the ceiling on a normal week.

The honest limits: everything has to be a GitHub repository, so there is no quick throwaway experiment. When the daily allowance runs out the new task button is disabled until the rolling window resets, though existing work stays reviewable. And Google notes that paid tiers are currently limited to individual gmail.com accounts, with enterprise support still coming.

Can an open source coding agent replace a paid one?

Cline answers a question a lot of developers have been asking out loud: why am I paying a subscription for a coding assistant and separately paying for the model tokens it burns?

Cline's pricing page lists an Open Source plan that is free for individual developers. It covers the VS Code extension, the CLI, the client-side architecture, the MCP marketplace and multi-root workspaces, all under an Apache 2.0 licence. The paid tier is Enterprise, which adds SSO, role based access control, centralised billing and a JetBrains extension.

What you pay for is inference. You bring your own API key from whichever provider you already use, or buy credits through Cline at cost. That structure suits anyone whose usage is bursty. If you code heavily three days a month, a flat subscription is bad value and metered tokens are good value. If you code all day every day, the maths flips.

Operationally it does multi-file edits, runs shell commands, and splits work into a plan phase and an act phase so you approve the plan before anything on disk changes. That approval step is the difference between an agent you can leave running and one you have to babysit. If you are choosing between agents rather than just collecting them, the side by side breakdowns on WhichAIBest are a faster read than four separate pricing pages.

The honest limits: it is not zero setup. You need an API key before the first prompt, which is a real barrier if you have never made one. And the free label describes the software, not your monthly spend.

How do you run an AI model without sending data anywhere?

Ollama is the answer to a question that comes up constantly from freelancers and anyone in a regulated field: where does my prompt go, and who can read it?

With Ollama, nowhere. It downloads open weight models and runs them on your own computer with a single command. Ollama's pricing page lists a Free plan at zero dollars that includes running models locally with no usage limits, alongside starter credits if you want to try its hosted cloud instead. Paid Pro at 20 dollars a month and Max at 100 dollars a month buy cloud credits and larger hosted models.

The local path is the one that matters here. There is no daily message cap, no rolling window, no account required to run a model on your own hardware. It also connects to coding agents, VS Code and automation tools including n8n, so it can sit underneath the other tools in this roundup as the model layer rather than replacing them.

The honest limits: your laptop is the ceiling. A machine with 16 GB of memory runs small models comfortably and struggles with large ones, and output speed is whatever your hardware can manage. That is a genuine tradeoff against a hosted frontier model, not a rounding error. Setup is also more technical than opening a website, though it is a single install and a single command rather than a weekend project.

Which automation tool is free without a subscription?

n8n wires apps, APIs and AI models into workflows that fire on a trigger or a schedule. Summarise every new email from a client into a spreadsheet row. Draft social captions from an RSS feed every Monday. The value is that it runs when you are not there.

Here is the catch, stated before the praise: free means self-hosted only. n8n's documentation on choosing how to use n8n describes the Community Edition as free with almost the complete feature set, provided you install and run it yourself. The hosted n8n Cloud has no permanent free tier at all. It runs a 14 day trial and then requires a paid plan, starting at roughly 20 euros a month for the Starter tier.

We are listing it anyway, because a free self-hosted tool with nearly every feature is a genuinely good deal for someone comfortable running a container. Registering an email address on the self-hosted edition unlocks additional free features including folders, debugging and custom execution data. SSO, environments and projects require a paid licence.

The honest limits: you are the sysadmin. Updates, backups and uptime are your problem, and if the box goes down at 2am so do your automations. That is the actual price of the free tier, paid in attention rather than money. If you want AI automation without owning infrastructure, this is not your tool.

Do these tools work from Southeast Asia?

All four, without a VPN, tested from the region.

Three of them are open source software you install on your own machine, which removes the question entirely: Cline, Ollama and n8n have no country gate because there is no gate. Jules needs a Google account and a GitHub repository, both of which work normally across Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines and Indonesia.

The usual regional failure mode for free tools is payment rather than geography. A free tier that demands a card at signup often rejects cards issued outside a handful of markets, which turns free into unavailable. None of this week's four asks for a card to begin. Our guide to free AI tools for freelancers in SEA covers that pattern in more depth, and the full category listing covers the rest of the directory.

What should you watch out for this week?

Three things, and they generalise well beyond these four tools.

Free software and free usage are different claims. Cline is free software that costs money to run, because the model bills you. Ollama is free software that genuinely costs nothing to run, because your own computer does the work. Both are correctly described as free, and they mean opposite things for your monthly spend. Read which kind of free you are being offered.

Check whether free includes hosting. n8n is the clearest example in this batch. The software is free and the convenience is not. Any tool that says free and self-hosted in the same sentence is asking you to pay in setup time and maintenance, which is a real cost even though it never appears on a statement.

Allowances reset, they do not accumulate. Jules gives 15 tasks per rolling 24 hours. An unused Tuesday does not make Wednesday worth 30. This is standard for agent products and it is the number people misread most often when planning a week of work. Getting more out of a fixed allowance is mostly a prompting problem, and the prompt libraries at PromptCraft Asia are a reasonable shortcut if you keep burning tasks on badly specified requests.

What else do people ask?

Is Google Jules free to use?

Yes. Google's own usage limits documentation lists a free Jules plan at 15 tasks per rolling 24 hours with 3 tasks running at once, and states that no payment is required. The paid tiers are not standalone subscriptions: Jules in Pro rides on a Google AI Pro plan at 100 tasks a day, and Jules in Ultra on a Google AI Ultra plan at 300 tasks a day. When you hit the free limit the new task button is disabled until the rolling window resets, though you can still review work already in progress.

Does Cline cost anything to run?

The agent itself does not. Cline's pricing page lists an Open Source plan that is free for individual developers and covers the VS Code extension, the CLI, the MCP marketplace and multi-root workspaces. What costs money is the model. You either bring your own API key from a provider you already pay, or buy inference credits at cost through Cline. So the tool is free and the tokens are not, which is a different bargain from a flat monthly fee and usually cheaper for light use.

Is Ollama really free, and is it private?

Running models locally is free with no usage limits, which Ollama states on its own pricing page under the zero dollar Free plan. Because inference happens on your machine, prompts and files never reach a third party server, which is the main reason to choose it over a hosted chatbot for client work. The hosted Ollama Cloud option is separate: the free plan there includes only starter credits and starter models, with Pro at 20 dollars a month and Max at 100 dollars a month for more.

Is n8n free without self-hosting?

No. This is the catch worth knowing before you start. n8n's documentation describes the Community Edition as free with almost the complete feature set, but only when you host it yourself. n8n Cloud has no permanent free tier: it offers a 14 day trial and then requires a paid plan starting at around 20 euros a month. Registering an email address on the self-hosted edition unlocks extra free features such as folders and debugging, while SSO, environments and projects need a paid licence.

Do these free AI tools work in Southeast Asia?

All four work from Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines and Indonesia without a VPN. Jules needs a Google account and a GitHub repository, both of which are available across the region. Cline, Ollama and n8n are open source software you install yourself, so there is no country gate at all. None of the four asks for a credit card to start, which matters because card rejection is the most common way a free tier quietly fails for regional users.

Sources: Jules usage limits documentation for the free plan at 15 tasks per rolling 24 hours, 3 concurrent tasks, and the Pro and Ultra tiers at 100 and 300 tasks a day. Cline pricing page for the Open Source plan being free for individual developers and for inference being billed separately. Ollama pricing page for the zero dollar Free plan with unlimited local model usage and starter cloud credits, and for Pro at 20 dollars and Max at 100 dollars a month. n8n pricing page and n8n documentation for the free self-hosted Community Edition, the absence of a permanent free cloud tier, and Starter pricing from around 20 euros a month. All limits verified 28 September 2026 and subject to change without notice. Check each vendor before relying on a limit.