New Free AI Tools This Week

Last week's four additions were all agents and runtimes, which made for a tidy story about free AI moving away from the chat window. This week's four have nothing in common on the surface. One generates images, one turns speech into text, one reads your documents, one makes flashcards.

What they share is more useful than a category. Each one is free in a completely different unit of measurement, and the unit is the thing that decides whether the free tier is any good for you. One counts daily credits. One counts words per week, and counts them differently depending on which device you are holding. One counts nothing at all but hands you a bill somewhere else. One does not meter usage and instead meters features.

As always, every number below comes from the vendor's own pricing page or documentation rather than a roundup. Two of this week's four have a restriction we would call a catch, and both are stated in the section heading rather than buried at the bottom.

What are the new free AI tools this week?

The short version before the detail:

• Krea, an image generation canvas you steer with sketches and style references. Free gives 100 compute units per day. Commercial rights are not included.
• Wispr Flow, system-wide voice dictation that formats as you speak. Free is 2,000 words a week on desktop and unlimited on Android.
• AnythingLLM, a desktop app for asking questions of your own files. Free and MIT licensed. You supply the model.
• Knowt, flashcards and study modes for students. Unlimited and free, with the AI features metered rather than the studying.

That spread is deliberate. The directory had grown heavy in coding after several weeks of agent launches, and image, audio and education had gone a while without a genuinely new entry worth the space.

Is Krea AI free, and what is the catch?

Krea is the most interesting image tool we have looked at this quarter, and it is also the one whose free tier needs the clearest warning label.

Start with what it does differently. Most image generators are a text box: you write a prompt, you get four images, you rewrite the prompt. Krea is a canvas. You can drop in a reference image and tell it to follow that style, sketch roughly where you want things and watch a real-time preview update as you draw, and adjust direction visually rather than by hunting for the right adjective. If you know the look you want but cannot describe it in words, that is a meaningfully different workflow rather than a cosmetic one.

The free plan is real. Krea's own writing puts it at 100 compute units per day with no credit card required, covering Krea 2, its frontier image model, direction-driven generation with a style reference, basic upscaling to 2K and limited LoRA training. That allowance refreshes every day rather than counting down once, which is the difference between a free tier and a trial.

Now the catch, and it is a real one: the free tier does not include a commercial licence. Krea reserves commercial rights, the full model library, the video models, the 8K-class enhancement tools and the editing pipeline for paid plans starting at 9 dollars a month. That is not a small print detail for the audience this site writes for. If you are a freelancer making a thumbnail for a client, the free tier is for exploration only and the output cannot ship. If you are making a wallpaper for your own laptop, it is free in every sense that matters.

We are listing it anyway, because exploration is genuinely most of the work in visual design, and 100 units a day is a lot of exploration. If you are weighing it against Ideogram, Leonardo or Firefly rather than just adding another account, the side by side breakdowns at WhichAIBest compare licensing terms alongside output quality, which is the axis that actually separates these tools now.

Which voice dictation tool is free to use daily?

Wispr Flow does one thing: you hold a key, you talk, and formatted text appears in whatever application currently has focus. Not a transcript with every stumble preserved, but cleaned text with filler words removed and punctuation added. It works inside Gmail, Slack, a code editor or a document, because it types into the operating system rather than living in its own window.

The free tier is the most lopsided one we have written up in months, and lopsided in an interesting direction. Wispr Flow's pricing page lists the free plan at 2,000 words per week on Mac and Windows, 1,000 words per week on iPhone, and unlimited on Android. Free also covers more than 100 languages, personalised learning of names and technical terms you use often, a custom dictionary and snippets, and limited Notetaker access on Mac. Pro removes the cap at 15 dollars a month, or 12 a month paid annually.

Be honest about the desktop number. Two thousand words a week is roughly a few long emails, or about thirteen minutes of talking. It is a sampler rather than a working allowance, and anyone who drafts by voice all day will hit it on a Tuesday. The Android tier is the genuinely useful one, and it is unusual enough to be worth saying plainly: unlimited dictation, at no cost, on the platform most of Southeast Asia actually uses.

The honest limits beyond the word cap: dictation requires an internet connection, so there is no offline mode, and the free Notetaker is Mac only with weekly meeting limits. Speaking well to a machine is also a skill, and a badly structured spoken paragraph produces badly structured text no matter how good the cleanup is.

How do you chat with your own documents privately?

The question behind AnythingLLM comes up constantly from freelancers, accountants, lawyers and anyone handling material that belongs to someone else: I want to ask questions of these fifty PDFs, and I cannot upload them to a chatbot.

AnythingLLM is a desktop app that solves exactly that. You drag in PDFs, Word files and text, it indexes them locally with its own built-in vector database and embedder, and you ask questions that get answered from your material rather than from the open web. Workspaces keep separate document sets apart, so one client's files never end up informing an answer about another's.

It is free and it is open source. The project is MIT licensed on GitHub with roughly 66,000 stars, and the desktop app for Mac, Windows and Linux is free to download with no usage cap. Self-hosting the team version with Docker is free as well. The managed cloud from Mintplex Labs is a separate product starting at 50 dollars a month, which is worth knowing so you do not mistake the cloud pricing for the app's.

Here is the part that decides whether it is actually free for you: AnythingLLM does not include a model. It connects to more than 30 providers, including OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Mistral and Groq, and to local runtimes such as Ollama and llama.cpp. Point it at a cloud provider and you pay that provider per token. Point it at a model running on your own machine and you pay nothing and the documents never leave the laptop, which is the whole reason to choose this over a hosted chatbot. Your hardware becomes the ceiling instead of a bill.

Which study app still gives students free flashcards?

Knowt is the simplest entry this week and the easiest to recommend, because its free tier inverts the usual pattern.

Most study apps give you unlimited basic cards and charge for the modes that make studying work. Knowt gives away the modes. Knowt states unlimited flashcard creation with learn mode included for free, alongside spaced repetition, matching and practice tests, plus a shared library of more than 5 million student-made resources. That is close to the exact feature set Quizlet moved behind a subscription, and Knowt makes the comparison itself rather than leaving you to notice.

The AI features are the newer half and they are also on the free plan: a lecture notetaker that records a class and writes it up, a PDF summariser for a reading you were assigned, a video summariser for a recorded lecture, automatic conversion of your own notes into flashcards, and Kai, a voice tutor you can talk through a problem with. The paid Ultra tier raises the ceilings on AI summaries, Kai chat and auto-graded assessments rather than unlocking studying itself.

The honest limits: the heaviest AI use is metered, so a student running every chapter of a textbook through the summariser will find the edge of the free plan. Community sets vary in accuracy, which is true of every shared study library and is a reason to generate cards from your own materials rather than trusting a stranger's. Students building a wider free toolkit will find the rest of the category in our guide to free AI tools for students.

What is each free tier actually measured in?

This is the part worth taking away even if none of these four tools is for you.

Krea measures in daily credits, and restricts rights rather than volume. You get plenty of generations and you do not get to sell what they produce. Whenever a creative tool advertises a generous free allowance, the licence is the first thing to check, because a tool can be simultaneously generous with usage and useless for paid work.

Wispr Flow measures in words, and the number changes by device. A free tier that differs by platform is rare enough that most roundups get it wrong and quote one figure. Read which device the number applies to before you decide the tool is too limited, because in this case the answer flips from sampler to unlimited depending on what is in your hand.

AnythingLLM measures nothing, and moves the cost elsewhere. Free software with no usage cap still has a running cost if it needs a model, an API key or a server. This is the same distinction we drew last week between free software and free usage, and it keeps appearing because open source AI tools are almost always the wrapper rather than the engine.

Knowt measures features, not usage. Unlimited studying, metered AI. This is the friendliest shape of free tier for the person who needs the basics forever and dips into the clever parts occasionally, which describes most students accurately.

One practical note that cuts across all four: a fixed allowance goes much further when you are precise about what you ask for. Burning ten Krea credits on vague prompts or a week of Wispr words on rambling dictation is a prompting problem rather than a pricing problem, and the ready-made prompt libraries at PromptCraft Asia are a faster fix than upgrading.

Do these tools work from Southeast Asia?

All four, without a VPN, and none of them asks for a credit card to begin.

Krea and Knowt are browser products with ordinary email or Google sign-in and no regional gate. AnythingLLM is a download that runs locally, so there is no country check to pass at all. Wispr Flow is a desktop and mobile app available on all four platforms across the region.

Wispr Flow deserves a specific regional note. Android dominates across Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam and much of Malaysia, and the Android free tier is the unlimited one. A tool whose most generous plan lands on the region's most common platform is unusual, and it flips the normal pattern where the best free tier quietly assumes a MacBook.

The usual regional failure mode remains payment rather than geography. A free tier that demands a card at signup often rejects cards issued outside a small set of markets, which turns free into unavailable without ever saying so. None of this week's four has that problem. Our guide to free AI tools for freelancers in SEA covers the pattern in more depth, and the full category listing covers the rest of the directory. If you want a ranked opinion rather than a directory, WhichAIBest takes the other approach and picks one winner per use case.

What else do people ask?

Is Krea AI free, and can you use the images commercially?

Krea is free to use and not free to sell from. Krea states a free plan of 100 compute units per day with no credit card, which includes its Krea 2 image model, direction-driven generation with a style reference, and basic upscaling to 2K. The restriction that matters is the licence: the free tier does not include commercial rights, so anything going to a client, a storefront or a paid project needs the Basic plan at 9 dollars a month. Video models, the 8K enhancement tools and the full model library are also paid only. For personal work and for exploring a visual direction before you commit, the free allowance refreshes daily rather than counting down once.

How many words does Wispr Flow give you for free?

It depends entirely on which device you dictate from. Wispr Flow's pricing page lists the free plan at 2,000 words per week on Mac and Windows, 1,000 words per week on iPhone, and unlimited dictation on Android. The free tier also covers more than 100 languages, personalised learning of names and jargon, a custom dictionary and snippets, and limited Notetaker access on Mac. Pro at 15 dollars a month, or 12 a month billed annually, removes the word cap. The desktop figure is modest, roughly a handful of long emails, so the free plan is most useful to Android users and to anyone testing whether dictation suits how they write.

Is AnythingLLM really free to use?

The software is, with a condition attached. The desktop app for Mac, Windows and Linux is free to download, the project is MIT licensed on GitHub with roughly 66,000 stars, and self-hosting the team version with Docker costs nothing either. What the app does not include is a model. You either run an open weight model on your own hardware, which is free but limited by your machine, or connect one of the 30 or more supported providers with your own API key, which bills you per token. The managed cloud from Mintplex Labs is a separate paid product starting at 50 dollars a month.

Is Knowt free, and how does it compare with Quizlet?

Knowt's free tier is unusual because the limit is not on usage. Knowt states unlimited flashcard creation with all study modes included, meaning learn mode, spaced repetition, matching and practice tests, plus a shared library of more than 5 million student-made resources. Those are largely the features Quizlet moved behind a subscription, which is the comparison Knowt makes itself. AI tools on the free plan include a lecture notetaker, a PDF summariser, a video summariser, notes-to-flashcard conversion and Kai, its voice tutor. The paid Ultra tier lifts the caps on AI summaries, Kai chat and auto-graded assessments rather than unlocking basic studying.

Do these free AI tools work in Southeast Asia?

All four work from Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines and Indonesia without a VPN, and none asks for a credit card to start. Krea and Knowt are browser products with ordinary email or Google sign-in. Wispr Flow is a desktop and mobile app, and its Android tier is the strongest free offer in this batch for the region, since unlimited dictation costs nothing regardless of where you are. AnythingLLM is a download with no account gate at all. Card rejection rather than geography is the usual way a free tier quietly fails for regional users, and that failure mode does not apply to any of these four.

Sources: Krea for the free plan at 100 compute units per day with no credit card, access to Krea 2, style reference and 2K upscaling, and for commercial licensing, video models and 8K enhancement being paid only. Wispr Flow pricing page for the free plan at 2,000 words a week on Mac and Windows, 1,000 on iPhone and unlimited on Android, 100+ language support, and Pro at 15 dollars a month or 12 billed annually. AnythingLLM pricing page for the free desktop app and the managed cloud from 50 dollars a month, and the AnythingLLM GitHub repository for the MIT licence, the star count and the list of supported model providers and vector databases. Knowt for unlimited free flashcards and learn mode, the study modes included at no cost, the 5 million resource library and the free AI notetaker and summarisers. All limits verified 6 October 2026 and subject to change without notice. Check each vendor before relying on a limit.