I use the free Chat AIs all the time; Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok, Mistral.

In the last month they have all clamped down quite heavily. I use to be able to deep-dive into a subject, or fix a small Python project, multiple times per day on the free Web UIs.

Claude, this morning, modified a small Python project for me and that single act exhausted all my free usage for the day. In the past I could do multiple projects per day without issue.

Same with ChatGPT. Gemini at least doesn't go full on "You can use this again at 1100AM", but it does fallback to a model that works very poorly.

Grok and Mistral I don't really use that much, but Grok's coding isn't that bad. The problem is that it is not such a good application for deep-diving a topic, because it will perform a web search before answering anything, making it take long.

Mistral tends to run out of steam very quickly in a conversation. Never tried code on it though.