Best Free ChatGPT Plugins: What Is Actually Free?

Every ChatGPT plugin installs at no cost, because the directory has no price field. Ten plugins across ten jobs, with each free tier checked against the vendor.

Per Harald Borgen

Per Harald Borgen

— 10 min read
Best Free ChatGPT Plugins: What Is Actually Free?

Every plugin in ChatGPT's directory installs at no cost. That is a design decision, not generosity: the directory has no price field and no plan column, so nothing in it tells you what a plugin costs. The bill sits with the vendor whose account you connect, and free tiers there come in five shapes. Which one you get decides whether a plugin lasts a year or an afternoon. Below are ten plugins across ten jobs, each free tier read off the vendor's pricing page on 8 September 2026.

Disclosure: Scrimba publishes this article and makes one of the plugins in it. The product is Scrimba Explain and its directory listing is called Explain Video Generator. It is not ranked first, it appears under the one shape of free it belongs to, and its limits are given at the same depth as everyone else's. Where it cannot be compared, this article says so rather than leaving a gap.

What Does "Free" Mean in ChatGPT's Plugin Directory?

In ChatGPT's plugin directory, free means the plugin costs nothing to install. It says nothing about the vendor account behind it, where every allowance, cap and licence lives.

Open any listing and you get a title, a tagline, a description, three example prompts, an Install plugin button and an Information block carrying Capabilities, Developer, Category, Website, Version and legal links. Across ten listings checked on 8 September 2026, not one of those fields is a price.

The search box says it more bluntly. Typing free into the directory that day returned Freeway Insurance, Freediver, Free2move and Crbonfree. The word gets matched against plugin names, because there are no prices to match against.

What OpenAI does gate is which plugins you can reach at all, in its own wording:

Select plugins are available in all plans, including ChatGPT Free, Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise, Edu, and ChatGPT for Teachers. Some plugins require a paid plan.

Two conditions sit above the vendor as well. Plugins are on by default for Business subscribers but off on Enterprise until an admin turns them on, and OpenAI's help center adds that using one "depends on your plan, workspace, role, region, and its included capabilities".

One thing catches people at step zero: a plugin does nothing until installed, and @ mentioning an uninstalled one returns ordinary text with no error. Install first, then judge the free tier. The rule below is simpler still. Read the pricing page, not the listing.

What Is Actually Free, by Job

Free tiers vary more inside one of the directory's fourteen topical sections than between them, so the table is organized by job. Every figure comes from the vendor's pricing page, checked 8 September 2026.

Plugin, as listed Made by The job it does What the free plan gives you Where the limit bites first
GitHub OpenAI Read and triage a repository $0 per user forever, unlimited repos 2,000 CI/CD minutes a month
Trello Trello Run boards and cards 10 boards, 10 collaborators per Workspace Trello's AI features excluded from Free
Supabase Supabase Query and manage a database $0, full Postgres, edge functions Paused after 1 week idle, 2 projects
Vercel Vercel Labs Build and deploy web apps Hobby, $0, with usage caps Personal, non-commercial use only
Canva Canva Create and edit designs US$0 a year, 5 GB storage 200 Standard AI uses a month, or 20 Premium
Figma Figma Design files and design to code Starter, free, unlimited drafts 20 MCP server tool calls a month
Notion Notion Docs, tasks and databases $0 per member, unlimited pages for one 5 MB uploads, Notion AI is a trial
Zoom Zoom Recap and search meetings Basic, free, 100 participants 3 meeting summaries a month
Spotify Spotify Find music, podcasts, audiobooks Search and playback for everyone Playlist from a description needs Premium
Explain Video Generator Scrimba AS Explain something as a narrated video Free during open beta No allowance or cap published

Free Plans That Cap How Much You Can Hold

These are the safest free tiers in the directory. The plan is permanent, nothing is metered per prompt, and the ceiling is what you accumulate.

GitHub, listed as "Triage PRs, issues, CI, and publish flows" and built by OpenAI itself, starts from the most generous position in the directory. Its pricing page puts Free at $0 per user a month, free "forever", with unlimited public and private repositories, 2,000 CI/CD minutes a month and 500 MB of Packages storage.

The plugin reads repository files, folder structure and commit history, none of which touches the metered part of the plan, so for reading a codebase inside a chat the free tier is the product. Scrimba's guide to understanding a new codebase fast covers what to ask once you are in.

Trello caps collaboration rather than compute. Its pricing gives Free up to 10 boards and 10 collaborators per Workspace, with unlimited Power-Ups. The same comparison table marks AI organization and AI-generated boards as unavailable on Free, with AI features starting at $5 a month. The plugin is a separate route into those boards, not an unlock, and it can only create what your plan allows.

Supabase, listed as "Manage and query databases", writes its limit into one sentence: free projects are paused after one week of inactivity, with a maximum of two active projects. A paused project is not deleted, but a plugin cannot query it either. Underneath runs the same Model Context Protocol plumbing as most of these plugins.

Free Plans That Cap the AI

Here the free plan is permanent and generous on storage. What it meters is the exact thing you installed a plugin to do.

Canva, listed as "Create, review, edit designs", gives a lot away: its pricing puts Free at US$0 a year for one person, with more than 1.6 million templates and 5 GB of storage. Then the AI allowance. Up to 200 uses of Standard AI or 20 of Premium AI a month, from one shared pool that resets monthly, with no Ultra tier at all. Twenty premium generations is one afternoon of iterating on a single poster.

Canva also names a paid gate on the listing itself, which almost no other vendor does. Its directory entry states that Bulk Create requires an eligible Canva Enterprise plan, so one of its six advertised skills is closed to everyone below the top tier before you install.

Then there is Figma, free on its Starter plan with unlimited drafts and, per its pricing, 150 AI credits a day up to 500 a month. That reads fine until the row that decides whether a plugin is usable at all. Figma rates its MCP server, the layer that lets AI agents reach Figma context, at 20 tool calls a month on Starter against 200 a day on Professional. One conversation that reads a file, lists its components and exports a frame can spend three. In Figma's favor, its agent is free during its own beta and burns no AI credits for now.

Notion is unusually direct about who its free plan is for. Its pricing describes Free at $0 per member a month as "for individuals to organize personal projects and life", with pages and blocks unlimited for one person and limited from two members up. Uploads cap at 5 MB per file, Notion AI on Free is a trial rather than an entitlement, and agents are free to try then $10 per 1,000 monthly credits. The workspace is yours and the AI is the sample.

Free Plans That Cap Who You Are, or What the Plugin Is For

Two more shapes, both breaking an assumption people carry into a free tier.

The first is a licence cap, and Vercel shows it plainly. Its plugin sits under Developer Tools with the example prompt "@Vercel why is my build failing?". Hobby costs nothing, and Vercel's pricing defines it in one sentence: the Hobby plan is for personal, non-commercial use. A free Hobby account also cannot purchase extra usage. So Hobby is not a smaller version of Pro. It is a different licence with no escape hatch, and the moment a project earns money the free tier stops applying regardless of how little you used it.

The second shape is nastier: the plugin's headline capability is what the free plan excludes.

Zoom's plugin is built around recapping and searching meetings. On Zoom's pricing page, Basic is free with up to 100 participants, but meetings run 40 minutes against 30 hours on paid plans, recording is local only, and meeting summaries are capped at three hosted meetings a month against unlimited on Pro at $14.16 per user a month. A plugin whose job is recapping meetings runs out after three recaps.

Spotify draws the line more precisely. Asking for songs, artists, genres, playlists, podcasts and audiobooks works for anyone, and its listing names the exception in its own words: Premium listeners can describe a vibe and get a playlist made to match. Premium Individual is $12.99 a month. Describing a mood and getting a playlist back is why most people install this, and it is the part that is not free.

Three checks catch a job cap before you connect anything:

  • Read the plugin's example prompts, then find the matching row on the vendor's pricing table. A blank free column means the demo is a paid feature.
  • Look for a per-month count attached to the plugin's core verb, not to storage. "3 meeting summaries" is a job cap; "10 GB" is not.
  • Check whether the plan restricts who may use it rather than how much. Licence limits show up in no allowance.

Free During Open Beta, Which Is a Different Promise

The fifth shape has no plan, no allowance and no published terms. It is the most generous state a tool can be in, the least predictable, and it shares no axis with the four above.

Scrimba Explain, listed as Explain Video Generator under Education & Research, is in that state. Its developer is Scrimba AS, its tagline is "Free AI video maker by Scrimba", and it turns a topic, document, webpage, codebase or product brief into a narrated video with voiceover, diagrams, animations and code walkthroughs. Access takes two steps: a free Scrimba account, then the plugin.

Scrimba publishes no allowance, no monthly cap and no commercial-use clause, so there is nothing to compare against Canva's 200 uses or Figma's 20 tool calls. That is not a better deal, it is an unpriced one, and an unpriced tool is one whose terms can still arrive.

The limits are the same ones every other entry gets. No avatars, no stock footage and no brand templates, so it is not an alternative to a marketing video tool. It explains something rather than producing video generally, a narrower job than the category name suggests. Scrimba's own FAQ says it can make mistakes, so anything that matters should be checked.

scrimba.com/explain carries a public gallery of roughly 150 published explanations with authors, runtimes and view counts, browsable without an account. Scrimba's guide to using Explain covers what makes a good prompt. If the job is video production rather than explanation, the roundup of video plugins ranks that category and this page does not.

How to Check a Plugin's Free Tier in Two Minutes

Two minutes of checking beats an afternoon of finding a cap. Order matters: the hardest gates sit furthest from the listing.

  1. Read the listing's Information block. Most listings name no plan requirement. When one does, as Canva's Enterprise line does, that is the hardest gate you will find.
  2. Open the vendor's pricing page, not its homepage. Homepages advertise the free plan. Pricing pages define it, usually below the plan cards.
  3. Find the row that matches your job, not the plan headline. "Free forever" and "3 meeting summaries a month" can sit in the same column.
  4. Look for the three limits that stop work: a metered allowance that resets, a licence restriction on who may use it, and an inactivity rule that switches things off while you are away.
  5. Check your own ChatGPT plan and workspace last. Some plugins require a paid plan, and Enterprise workspaces have them off until an administrator enables them.

Then pick the shape of free that matches how you work, and only then the plugin. A weekly repository reader and a commercial site get opposite answers on the same tool. Scrimba's audit of free AI video generators takes free tiers apart the same way in one category.

Frequently Asked Questions

Are ChatGPT plugins free?

Every plugin installs at no cost, and the directory shows no prices. What varies is the vendor account behind it, which may carry a permanent free plan, a metered monthly allowance, a licence limited to personal use, or no published terms yet. OpenAI states that some plugins need a paid ChatGPT plan.

Does ChatGPT charge for plugins?

No. OpenAI states that select plugins are available on all plans including ChatGPT Free, though some require a paid plan. Rendering, storage, allowances and billing sit with the vendor you connect, so a ChatGPT subscription buys none of it. Enterprise workspaces keep plugins off until an admin enables them.

Which ChatGPT plugins have the most generous free plans?

GitHub, Trello and Supabase publish permanent free plans that cap accumulation rather than usage, so nothing is metered per prompt. GitHub Free is $0 per user forever with unlimited repositories, Trello Free covers 10 boards per Workspace, and Supabase Free allows two active projects.

Why does the plugin directory not show prices?

A listing carries a title, tagline, description, example prompts, an install control and an Information block naming capabilities, developer, category and version. None of those is a price, because pricing belongs to the vendor's account. Searching the directory for free matches plugin names instead.

What does "free during open beta" mean?

It means the vendor has not set terms yet. There is no plan, no monthly allowance and no published cap, so the tool cannot be compared against a metered free tier. It is usually more generous in the short term, and carries no commitment that today's access continues.

Key Takeaways

  • The directory has no price field. A listing shows capabilities, developer, category and version, never a price, so free is always a claim about the vendor rather than about OpenAI.
  • Free tiers come in five shapes: capped by scale, by an AI allowance, by licence, on the plugin's own core job, or unpriced during a beta.
  • The job cap is the one that hurts. Zoom's free plan allows three meeting summaries a month; Spotify's playlist generation needs Premium.
  • Licence limits appear in no allowance. Vercel's Hobby plan costs nothing, is defined as personal and non-commercial, and cannot buy extra usage.
  • Unpriced is not the same as generous. Scrimba Explain is free during open beta with no published allowance or cap, so there is nothing to compare and nothing committed to.
  • Check the vendor's pricing page, not the listing, and find the row matching your job rather than the plan headline.

Sources

All vendor and documentation pages accessed 8 September 2026.

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