Free Google AI Tools List 2026: What Is Actually Free, What Costs Money, and the Privacy Catches

How we checked this list (and why it matters)

Google AI product names, limits and prices change fast, and a lot of "complete lists" online mix old facts with new ones. For this guide we opened Google's own pages on November 11, 2026: the Gemini subscriptions page for Canada, the Gemini Apps privacy help page, the Gemini API pricing page, and the help page for Gemini Notebook. Where a detail was not on a Google page we opened, we say so instead of guessing. If a limit matters to you, check the live page before you pay for anything.

One naming note first. Many people still call Google's research notebook tool "NotebookLM". The Google pages we opened now call it Gemini Notebook, and the old notebooklm.google address redirects to notebook.google. We use "Gemini Notebook" below and mention NotebookLM so you can find it when you search.

This list is for regular people and small businesses. It is not a developer reference, and it is not a ranking of which AI is "best". For that, see our comparison ChatGPT vs Claude vs Gemini and our broader best free AI tools guide. IT Cares is an independent IT support company and is not affiliated with Google.

The Google AI map in one minute

"Google AI tools" is not one product. It is a family of apps that mostly share the same underlying Gemini models but differ in what they are for. Here is the simple map:

• The Gemini app: a chat assistant. You type or talk, it answers, writes, summarizes and generates images.
• Gemini Notebook (NotebookLM): you upload your own documents and ask questions about them. Best for study and research.
• Google Flow: a creative studio for video, images and custom tools.
• Google AI Studio and the Gemini API: a developer playground for building with Gemini models. Free tier exists, with a privacy catch we explain below.
• AI features inside products you already use: Search, Gmail, Docs and others, usually tied to a paid plan.

The first big question is always the same: what is actually free? The short answer is that the free Gemini plan is generous for everyday use, and paid plans mostly add stronger models, higher limits, video generation and storage.

What the free Gemini plan includes (Canada, November 2026)

On Google's Canadian Gemini subscriptions page, the free plan is listed at $0 per month with a Google account. According to that page it includes:

• The Gemini app with access to the Flash-Lite model.
• Image generation and editing, Deep Research, Gemini Live, Canvas and Gems.
• Google Flow, with limited access to Nano Banana Pro.
• Gemini Notebook.
• 15 GB of cloud storage shared across Gmail, Drive and Photos.

That is a real toolbox for $0. The catch is that "included" does not mean "unlimited". The page ties the paid tiers to higher usage limits (twice the free limits on the lowest paid plan, four times on Pro). Google does not publish a simple daily message count for free users on that page, so expect to hit limits at busy moments and plan around it.

Free vs paid at a glance

Prices were read from Google's Canadian page on November 11, 2026, in Canadian dollars as displayed there. Taxes, promotions and student offers can change what you pay. The same page also lists business plans under the name Gemini Enterprise, starting from $21 US per user per month for the business edition (teams of up to 300 users) and $30 US per user per month for standard or plus editions.

Honest advice: start free. Move to a paid plan only when you hit a specific wall, such as running out of limits in the middle of work, needing video generation, or wanting Gemini inside Gmail and Docs.

1. The Gemini app: your everyday AI assistant

The Gemini app is the front door. You open it in a browser or on your phone, sign in with a Google account and start a conversation. On the free plan, Google's Canadian page lists these features: image generation and editing, Deep Research, Gemini Live, Canvas and Gems. Here is what each one means in plain language.

• Chat: ask questions, draft emails, rewrite text, explain a concept, plan a trip. This is the core.
• Image generation and editing: describe a picture and get one, or upload a photo and ask for changes. Google's own help pages mention that generated images carry an invisible SynthID watermark.
• Deep Research: instead of a quick answer, Gemini goes off to build a longer report on a topic. It takes more time and is meant for questions where one paragraph is not enough.
• Gemini Live: a voice conversation mode, handy while cooking, driving (hands-free) or practicing a language.
• Canvas: a side workspace where you and Gemini edit a document or small project together instead of scrolling a chat.
• Gems: custom versions of Gemini that you set up once with instructions (for example "act as my meeting-notes tidy-upper") and reuse.

Be careful with older articles here. One Google page we opened for the Gemini overview was last updated in July 2024 and describes Gems as coming soon and file uploads as Gemini Advanced only. That is out of date: the November 2026 subscriptions page lists Gems on the free plan. When two Google pages disagree, trust the one with the recent date.

What it is good for

Plain writing help, summaries of text you paste in, brainstorming, study explanations, and quick image ideas. It works well as a first draft machine. It is not a source of truth: Google's own page warns responses can be inaccurate, so check names, numbers and legal or medical claims.

What it is not good for

Anything confidential. We explain why in the privacy section below, but the short version is that a subset of chats can be read by human reviewers. Do not paste client files, passwords, medical records or anything covered by a confidentiality agreement.

2. Gemini Notebook (NotebookLM): the best free tool for studying

This is the tool we point students and researchers to first. You create a notebook, add your own sources (documents, notes, readings), and then ask questions that are answered from those sources. Because the answers are tied to what you uploaded, it is far easier to check where a claim came from than with a general chatbot.

Google's Canadian plans page lists Gemini Notebook on the free plan, and says that the Pro plan gives "five times more audio overviews, notebooks, and more". Audio overviews are the feature where the tool turns your sources into a spoken discussion you can listen to. We did not find exact free-plan limits (number of notebooks, sources or daily queries) on the pages we opened. The help page for the product links to a separate usage-limits article that we did not open, so check it before you plan a big project.

Privacy: better than most, with one condition

The Gemini Notebook help page says that for personal accounts, "Your data is protected, and is not used to train Gemini Notebook unless you provide feedback". If you send feedback, Google may review the full context of that interaction, including queries, uploads and responses. For Workspace accounts, the page says uploads, queries and responses will not be reviewed by human reviewers and will not be used to train AI models. Google may also process data to prevent fraud, abuse and technical problems.

Practical takeaway: do not click the feedback thumbs on a notebook that contains sensitive material. If you work with confidential documents, use a Workspace account under your organization's agreement rather than a personal one, and have your policy confirmed in writing.

Three ways to use it well

1. Study guide from your own course notes. Upload lecture notes and ask for a list of key terms, then for ten practice questions. Check the answers against the original notes.
2. Understand a long contract or policy. Upload it and ask "what are the deadlines and penalties?" Then verify each point in the document itself. This is a reading aid, not legal advice.
3. Prepare for a meeting. Upload reports and ask for a one-page briefing, then ask which claims in the briefing came from which source.

3. Google Flow: video, images and custom tools

Flow is Google's creative studio. The page title we saw describes it as an "AI Creative Studio for Video, Images & Custom Tools", and the page itself only showed a sign-in link, so for details we rely on the Gemini subscriptions page. That page says free users get Flow with limited access to Nano Banana Pro (an image model), Google AI Plus adds video generation and 200 Flow credits, Pro lists 1,000 credits, and Ultra lists 10,000 or 25,000 credits depending on tier.

So the pattern is clear even without the fine print: Flow runs on credits, free users get a taste, and serious video work costs money. We could not confirm from a primary page exactly how many credits a single video or image costs, or how many credits a free account receives, so do not budget a project until you have tried one test clip and watched your balance.

Simple tips for getting value from Flow

• Write short, concrete prompts: subject, setting, camera angle, mood. Long vague prompts waste credits.
• Generate one small test first before you commit credits to a series.
• Do not upload photos of other people without their permission, and never upload children's photos to a tool you have not read the privacy terms for.
• Label AI-made videos as AI-made when you publish them. It protects your credibility and is increasingly expected by platforms.

If you want a deeper walk-through of Google's video model, we are preparing a separate guide on free ways to use Veo. Check the blog for it.

4. Google AI Studio and the Gemini API: free, but read the fine print

AI Studio is where developers (and curious non-developers) try Gemini models directly and build things with the Gemini API. The page title says "Build with the Gemini API". If you are not building an app, you do not need it. If you are, there is a free tier.

The pricing page we opened shows a Free tier with "Limited access to certain models" and "Free input & output tokens". It lists a long set of models as free of charge on that tier, from Flash and Flash-Lite versions to text-to-speech and embedding models. It also lists several models, including the Gemini 4 Argon and Carbon models, the image models and the music models, as not available on the Free tier.

The important detail for privacy: the same pricing page states that content on the free tier is "used to improve our products". Paid-tier usage is generally marked as not used for that. In other words, free API use is not free of cost in the privacy sense. Do not put customer data, source code you do not own, or private documents through the free tier of the API.

Who should use it

Developers, students learning to code with AI, and small-business owners with a technical helper who want a quick prototype (for example a script that sorts incoming emails). Everyone else is better served by the Gemini app.

5. AI inside Search, Gmail and Docs

A lot of Google's AI shows up inside products you already use rather than in a separate app. The subscriptions page ties several of these to paid plans: Google AI Plus lists Gemini in Gmail and other Google apps and expanded Nano Banana access in Google Search, and AI Pro lists Gemini in Google Docs and other apps and agentic capabilities in Google Search.

We also found Google announcements about AI Mode in Search, including Canvas in AI Mode. The post we found says Canvas in AI Mode is available to everyone in the U.S. in English, and we did not find a Canadian confirmation, so we do not claim it is available in Canada. Availability by country and language is the single most common reason a feature "you read about" is missing from your screen. If it is missing, it may simply not have reached your region or your account type yet.

For Quebec readers: some features appear first in English and in the United States. A work or school Google account can also have features switched off by an administrator, even if your personal account has them.

6. Other Google AI names you may run into

Search results for "google ai tools" throw many names at you. Here is how we sort them, without claiming details we did not verify on Google's own pages:

• Google Antigravity: appears on the plans page, where AI Pro lists base rate limits for an agent model in Google Antigravity and Ultra lists higher limits. It is a developer-oriented tool, and we did not open its own documentation.
• Project Genie: listed on the plans page as Ultra only.
• Whisk, ImageFX and other Labs experiments: third-party guides disagree on whether these were merged into Flow or still stand alone. We could not verify it on a Google page, so we leave them out of the recommendations.
• Gemini CLI: one third-party guide claims it was retired in June 2026. We could not confirm that on a primary page, so treat it as unverified.

Rule of thumb: if a tool name appears in a list but you cannot find it on a Google page with a recent date, assume it may have changed or gone away.

What about "Qwen free" and other non-Google tools?

Some people searching for "google ai tools list" are really shopping for free AI in general and see Qwen mentioned (it comes from Alibaba, not Google). We did not open Qwen's official pages for this guide, so we will not quote its limits or terms. If you want to try a non-Google assistant, apply the same privacy checks in this guide: find the provider's own terms, see whether free chats are used for training or reviewed by people, and keep sensitive data out. Our best free AI tools article compares several options.

Privacy and security: what regular people should know

This is the part most "Google AI tools lists" skip, and it is the part where mistakes cost you. Google's Gemini Apps help page, which shows a Privacy Notice last updated October 13, 2026, gives these concrete facts:

• A setting called Keep Activity controls whether your chats are saved in your Gemini Apps Activity and used to improve AI models. With it off, future chats do not appear in your activity and are not used to train AI models, unless you submit feedback.
• With Keep Activity on, activity is auto-deleted after 18 months by default. You can change that to 3 or 36 months, or choose not to auto-delete.
• Chats with Keep Activity off, and temporary chats, are still retained with your account for 72 hours.
• A subset of chats is reviewed by human reviewers, including trained service providers. Chats are disconnected from your account before being sent to service providers.
• Reviewed chats are retained for up to three years, and deleting your activity does not remove them because they are disconnected from your account.
• Google advises not to enter confidential information you would not want a reviewer to see.

Read that last point twice. It means the privacy setting reduces what is stored and used, but it does not turn Gemini into a private vault. Even with Keep Activity off, Google says it still uses chats to respond to you and to protect Google and its users, including with help from human reviewers.

The three-minute privacy setup

1. Open Gemini Apps Activity and decide on Keep Activity. If you only use Gemini for casual questions, leaving it on is fine. If you ever paste work content, turn it off.
2. Shorten auto-delete to 3 months if you leave it on.
3. Use a separate Google account for AI experiments if your main account holds your email, banking alerts and documents.
4. Turn on two-step verification on the Google account, since an AI history can reveal a lot about you if someone gets in.

For a wider checklist across several assistants, see our AI privacy and safety checklist.

Security mistakes we see most often

• Pasting secrets. Passwords, API keys, recovery codes, or a full client list into a chatbot. Never do it.
• Trusting fake apps and extensions. Scammers publish "Gemini" or "AI" browser extensions that steal data. Install only from the official Google or browser store pages you reached from Google's own site, and read our warning on AI browser extension risks.
• Letting AI "agents" act with full access. Features that click, buy or send for you need extra caution. See AI browser agent security risks.
• Believing AI-made phishing. Emails written with AI look cleaner than old scams. Our guide on spotting AI-generated phishing shows what still gives them away.
• Staff using personal AI accounts for company data. This is called shadow AI. Read why shadow AI is a hidden risk.

Which Google AI tool should you pick?

Checklist: start using Google AI safely

Three realistic scenarios (illustrative)

Realistic scenario, illustrative only, not real clients.

Scenario 1: a college student on a zero budget

A student has twelve PDFs of readings and a midterm in nine days. Plan: upload the readings into a Gemini Notebook, ask for a glossary and then for practice questions, and listen to an audio overview on the bus. Use the Gemini app for explaining concepts she does not understand. Cost: $0 on the free plan. Risk to manage: the notes are her own, so privacy is low risk, but she should still check each answer against the readings, because the point of the test is her understanding, not the tool's.

Scenario 2: a three-person renovation business

The owner wants quote follow-up emails and a service description for the website. Plan: use the free Gemini app to draft text with generic details only (no client names or addresses), then edit in his own voice. He keeps Keep Activity off, because he occasionally pastes in real project descriptions. If he later wants Gemini inside Gmail, the Plus plan lists that at $6.99 per month on Google's Canadian page, which is worth testing for one month. Risk to manage: a price or promise that the AI invents. Every number in a quote is typed by a human.

Scenario 3: a restaurant owner making short promo videos

She wants five short clips for social media. Plan: try Flow on the free plan with one test, watch how many credits it uses, then decide between the Plus plan (200 credits listed) and simply hiring a freelancer. Because exact credit costs are not on the pages we opened, she budgets a one-month trial and a hard stop. Risk to manage: AI food images that do not look like her actual dishes, which can mislead customers. She uses AI only for backgrounds and mood, and real photos for the menu.

What it really costs: DIY vs paying a technician

The consultation price is the only IT Cares price we mention, and a setup hour is optional. Most individuals can do everything in this guide alone. Businesses with several users, shared documents or client data usually benefit from having someone check the settings once.

Official resources

• Google Gemini plans and pricing (Canada): gemini.google/subscriptions
• Gemini Apps privacy and activity help: support.google.com/gemini
• Gemini Notebook help: support.google.com/notebooklm
• Gemini API pricing (free tier terms): aistudio.google.com/docs/pricing
• Canadian privacy regulator for individuals: Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada

AI tools for a small business: where to start

If you run a company, the questions change. It is no longer "which tool is best" but "who is allowed to use what, with which data". Start with a one-page rule: approved tools, forbidden data, and who to ask. Our guides on writing an AI usage policy and Microsoft Copilot for business help with that. If you want to go beyond free chat tools and connect AI to your marketing and follow-up, a Quebec marketing agency such as Lead4Pro publishes a short roundup of five AI tools worth testing for small businesses that is a useful second opinion. We have no claims to make about outcomes there; read it and judge for yourself.

When to call a professional

You can do most of this alone. Call a technician when:

• Your Google account was accessed by someone else, or you suspect a fake AI extension is installed.
• Employees paste client information into personal AI accounts and you need a policy and settings that actually hold.
• You want Gemini features working across Gmail, Docs and shared drives without exposing documents to the wrong people.
• You are not sure whether a tool your team uses meets your obligations under Quebec's Law 25. Ask a lawyer for legal advice; we can help with the technical side.

IT Cares offers remote support across Canada and on-site visits in Quebec, and has done so since 2014. If you want help, you can book a remote session or call 1 (888) 711-9428. If you are new to AI chat tools in general, our AI chat starter session is a gentle way in.

Prices, limits and names on Google's pages change often. The facts in this guide were checked on November 11, 2026. Expect some details to drift, and always confirm on the live Google page before you pay.

Frequently asked questions

Related guides

• Best free AI tools 2026
• ChatGPT vs Claude vs Gemini
• AI privacy and safety checklist
• Shadow AI: the hidden risk
• How to write an AI usage policy
• AI browser extension security risks

Sources and official references

Last verified: November 11, 2026

• Google: Gemini plans and pricing, Canada (opened 2026-11-11)
• Google Gemini Apps Help: Keep Activity, retention and review (opened 2026-11-11)
• Google Gemini Notebook Help (opened 2026-11-11)
• Google AI Studio: Gemini API pricing (opened 2026-11-11)
• Google blog: Canvas in AI Mode (search result only)