The best free models is obviously Qwen 3.7 max

@Sss19971997 why?

@Velaris because rest are not free

@Sss19971997 I never said that it had to be open source or completely free.

Among the free models, Claude Sonnet has consistently been the most pleasant to just talk to, both with and without personalization options (among other things, I added a few instructions to mine to make it more eager to double-check any factual information and push back on misguided or contentious takes). It hedges more than other models when uncertain (helps it avoid being confidently wrong all the time), has impressively high emotional intelligence, and it feels like it also has a stronger understanding of both my and its own personal boundaries. And unlike Gemini Pro or GPT-5.5 Thinking, the limits are far more generous—which is rather funny considering which of the three companies is the most compute-constrained.

@moozooh I fully agree about the temperament and more cautious attitude but I've been running into limits more with it then Gemini. I like the model best but it don't use it much because I quickly get told that my usage limit is reached. It's rather unfortunate since until recently, I had quite a bit of free usage. Its responses also aren't quite as snappy in terms of speed.

@Velaris Gemini Flash or Pro? On the Gemini app, Pro only gives me 2-4 responses before it goes on break (virtually regardless of how long or complex they were). Flash is much more generous, yeah. AI Studio (when used for free) used to have better limits for Pro, but people caught on and those were tightened as well.

@moozooh I mostly use flash extended.

I use Gemini a lot but miss the ephemeral chat option. I haven't been able to use Claude as much because of usage limits. Should I try ChatGPT?

@Velaris vested interested ofc but GPT/Claude and Perplexity are the best combo iff using the free versions. If paid, go all in on Claude

If you have questions, I'd be happy to answer.

I think Claude is the best with current AI use cases, e.g. coding. Therefore it is the best model. It has way more enterprise and developer usage than the others. While you may think that the others have more potential I don't think that affects the current poll.

@Tectal333 I do like it, it can be slower than the others though.

Definitely not DeepSeek. After the initial hype it has heavily fallen off.

@Tectal333 I agree, but haven't used it in a while so I can't be certain.

@Velaris What limit does "Free Tier" include? For example, would free use of Google's AI Studio count as "Free Tier," or is it exclusively the gemini.google frontend free tier? Also, is the market just resolving one answer to 100%, as currently, it's not sum-to-one.

@Dssc I'm focusing on the standard consumer-facing interfaces, with no further setup than making an account. I won't be considering free trials or benefits you get for adding a credit card or something similar.

I intend to resolve each option to a percentage, they do not need to add up to 100 percent. I also intend to announce what percentages I want to resolve to and will open a poll if there's enough demand.