Free tiers don't have a price, they have defaults

A previous post here argued that free-tier quotas cannot be converted into work. This one is about the rest of the offer: terms that were never presented as terms, only as settings with a value already filled in.

A price has to be agreed. A default only has to be announced.

A default is a price nobody quoted you

When a paid plan changes, you get an email, a renewal date and the option to leave. When a default changes, you get a changelog entry.

A free tier's real cost to a vendor is the quota multiplied by the model serving it, and only the quota is on the pricing page. Moving the model is invisible.

The three axes, and the fourth

Which model serves you

The largest factor in what a free tier is worth, and the easiest to change without changing a published number. The same twelve-step agent task costs nearly two hundred times as much on the most expensive model in our catalogue as on the cheapest. Moving a free tier down the catalogue cuts the vendor's bill by more than any quota reduction would, while every advertised limit stays exactly as printed.

How much you get

The quota, and the only one of the three that pricing pages state. It is usually paid for from a marketing budget, so it moves when that budget is reviewed.

What happens to what you type

Whether your prompts, the model's outputs and the code around your cursor are retained and used for training. This is the axis that moved most decisively in 2026, and the one where the default differs by who is paying.

What happens at zero

The fourth, and the one you meet first. Running out can mean a hard stop, a silent move to a weaker model, metered overage, or an interruption that loses the task you were running. The previous post takes that one apart, including what an abandoned task has already cost by the time it stops.

What actually moved in 2026

Four dated changes, each from the vendor's own publication, and all announced properly.

GitHub's changelog says that from April 24 onward we will begin using interaction data, specifically inputs, outputs, code snippets, and associated context, from Copilot Free, Pro, and Pro+ users to train and improve our AI models. The opt-out is a dropdown in your Copilot settings, it is free, it takes about fifteen seconds, and GitHub states that once you opt out it stops collecting from that point forward. GitHub also says it does not use private repository content at rest for training, and a user who had previously opted out of data collection for product improvements stayed opted out.

This is a well-run company changing a default in public, with a working switch. What matters is the shape of the change: the plans that pay per seat were exempt, and the plans that do not were opted in.

What a free allowance is worth

Copilot Free is advertised at 2,000 completions per month plus limited chat and agent usage. The completions are the only part with a published number, so they are the only part that can be priced.

An inline completion is a small job: some surrounding code goes up, a line or two comes back. No vendor publishes the token shape of one, so the table below assumes 1,200 input tokens and 40 output tokens, states that assumption in its own markup, and prices 2,000 of them through the same engine Clixad meters with. The four models are a bracket, from the cheapest in our catalogue to a mid-sized one, rather than a guess at what GitHub runs.

Inline completions are served by small, fast models in practice, so the top row is the realistic one and the bottom row is an upper bound nobody is paying. A month of the advertised allowance is plausibly a quarter of a dollar of inference.

For comparison, completed offers on our CPX wall have credited from 9,000 to 114,000 credits on completion, with a median of 51,000: 26 completions recorded in our ledger between 27 July 2026 and 12 September 2026, as of 14 September 2026. A completion at the median is worth about twice that entire monthly allowance priced on GPT-5 Nano, and a little more than it priced on Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite. Being screened out is the normal case, not an error: most attempts end part way through and pay nothing or a small bonus, which is how offerwalls work everywhere. The largest completion paid more than twelve times the smallest, which is why that is a range.

None of that makes Copilot Free a bad deal. The deal is just not mainly about inference: two thousand completions a month cost little next to the value of being the tool a few million developers open by default, and next to whatever the interaction data is worth for training the next model.

Read the funder, not the policy

A privacy policy is a promise, and promises are revised with a changelog entry. A funding model is much harder to move. So ask what the money would make a vendor want, rather than what it currently permits itself.

• A vendor that sells models has a direct use for your prompts and your accepted completions. It may not use them, and it may say so convincingly, but the incentive is structural and it points one way.
• A vendor that sells seats to your employer has a strong reason to treat your employer's code carefully and a weaker one to treat your side project the same way. That is precisely the split the April change made visible.
• A vendor whose free tier is marketing is funding it from a budget that gets reviewed. What gets cut is the quota or the model, and the announcement will be about sustainability.
• A vendor funded by a rewarded action has no use for your code, because the money arrives from an advertiser for a completed form rather than from anything in your editor. That is how Clixad's offerwall works, and the first post here works through what it does and does not protect, including the things advertising exposes that a subscription does not.
• A vendor funded by ads inside the session is a different case, and the earlier wording here was too generous to it. If the advertisement is selected while you work, something has to select it: FreeBuff's launch post states that prompts and messages may be analyzed to personalize ads. "Ad-funded" is therefore not one privacy story but two, split by what is allowed to select the ad. The comparison post takes that apart, and the shortlist post places both among the free tiers that include model access.

Our defaults, written down

Clixad is a terminal coding agent funded by rewarded offerwall completions, by a sponsored line in the terminal, and by credit packs people can buy. Our own defaults, as they stand today:

What happens to what you type. The CLI holds no provider key, so every model call goes through our gateway, and your prompt and the file contents the agent read pass through it in transit on the way to the model provider. That is the price of metering centrally. We do not train on any of it: we have no model to train and no way to make money from your code. The offerwall receives an account identifier and the email address on your account (it dedupes respondents on the address, and asks you for it itself if we do not send it), and pays for a completed action. It receives no code, no prompt and no project name: the offerwall is a page in your browser, and nothing about your session is sent to it.

The advertising inside the tool. Since August 2026 the CLI shows a sponsored line above the input box while a model call runs, marked as an ad. Two more places can now show an ad during a model call as well: a small card beside the working line on a wide terminal, and a row under the status line. Each ad is fetched from an ad network by your machine rather than by our server, so that network sees your IP address, the way any site you open does, and with all of them showing a model call means up to three requests. What the network does not see is anything you typed: each request carries a publisher id, one fixed category set by us, an opaque token standing in for your account, and a one-off value, and there is no field in it a prompt could travel in. It is the smaller half of the funding, a fraction of what a completion pays and often nothing, and CLIXAD_SPONSOR=0 stops those requests altogether. It is a default that moved, so it belongs here.

Which model serves you. A stronger model costs more credits per turn rather than requiring a plan. The prices come from the provider's published rates and are pinned by tests to the figures on this site.

How much you get. New accounts start with 25,000 credits, which does not cover one agent task on most of the catalogue. A free account can earn at most 500,000 credits a day across every offerwall we run. Both are levers we control, the kind of default this article is about, so we publish them. When an allowance comes back is a default too: a later post puts the six reset windows side by side and finds four of them unpublished.

If offerwall payouts fell far enough, the levers that would move are the daily cap and the margin, because there is nothing on the data side to sell.

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