Half the AI tools that called themselves freemium were not
· ToolsNoCode
We compared the pricing label on 2,000 AI tool listings with what each tool's own homepage says. 439 labels were wrong, and the most common error was the same: a demo-only enterprise product filed as freemium.
When this directory started, 59 percent of its 3,098 listings carried the label "freemium". That number never came from the tools. It came from a scraper's default: when a page did not say, the row got freemium, because it sounded safe. Over the last three days we read about 2,000 of those homepages while rewriting descriptions, and asked one narrow question of each: what does the pricing model look like from the site itself?
Where a page gave explicit evidence, we corrected the label. Where it did not, we left it alone. The corrections tell a clear story about how AI tools present their prices in 2026.
Of the 439 rows we changed, 305 had been labelled freemium. So roughly two thirds of the freemium labels we could test were wrong, and the direction of the error was almost always the same: the tool was more expensive, or less self-serve, than the label suggested.