Every Top AI Model for Free (Gemini, Grok, Claude, GPT in One Place)

Every lab runs the same play: the free tier gets the small model, the real one sits behind a $20 to $30 subscription. Fine for one. But the best model changes every few months, so you end up subscribed to last season's winner, or paying four subscriptions to keep up.

You do not need any of them to USE the frontier models. You only need them if you want one specific model every day, and even then you should try it free first.

⚡ Open Arena

Arena grew out of the Berkeley Chatbot Arena research project (you might know it as LMArena, that address now lands here). It gives you the actual frontier lineup in one place: GPT, Gemini, Claude, Grok, Llama and more.

Two ways to use it:

• Direct chat: pick the exact model you want and talk to it.
• Battle mode: two anonymous models answer the same prompt side by side, you vote for the better answer, THEN it reveals which was which.

You are not the customer here. You are the judge.

• Every vote in battle mode feeds the Arena leaderboard, the closest thing AI has to an official scoreboard. Labs obsess over their rank on it and quote it in launch posts.
• That ranking only works with millions of real human votes, so the labs WANT their best models in front of you, answering your real prompts, for free.
• They even ship unreleased models under secret codenames to test them on real people before launch. Sometimes the anonymous model you just voted for is next month's flagship.

So the payment is not your card, it is your opinion. That is the whole business model.

The other half of the deal: they can read your chats and your generations. Your prompts, the model answers, and your votes become evaluation and research data, and some of it ends up in public research datasets. That is the real price of free. Use it as hard as you want, but treat every chat like a stranger could read it: no passwords, no client files, nothing private.

Also normal: battle mode asks you to vote before revealing names, and peak hours can rate limit you.

Doors like this get patched, gated, or acquired all the time. I send the newest tools, prompts, and free doors every week, before they blow up.

📬 Join the free weekly drop

Free, one email a week, unsubscribe whenever.

🎨 Open Design Arena

Design Arena runs the exact same economics for design. You describe a website, app screen, or UI, several anonymous models each generate their version, and you vote for the best one.

Which means: the newest design-capable models build your landing page for free, multiple takes at once, and you keep the winner. The votes rank the models, that is why nobody charges you. Same privacy deal as Arena: your prompts and generations feed the rankings, so keep client secrets out.

• Battle mode is the cheat code: you get two frontier answers to every prompt and keep the better one. Paste the same real task you would give a paid plan.
• Check the leaderboard before you ever pay anyone. If you are going to subscribe to ONE model, subscribe to the one actually winning this month, not the one with the best ads.
• Watch for codenames. Anonymous models with weird names are often stealth previews. You are testing the future for free.

My favorite battle prompt to stress test two models at once:

If you fall in love with one specific model, sure, pay for that ONE and cancel the rest. But paying four labs $20 to $30 each before trying every model free is exactly what they are hoping you do. Save the money 🤯