Four Of These Thirteen Free Alternatives Are The Same Company
Thirteen rows, two columns, one arrow. ChatGPT becomes DeepSeek. Midjourney becomes Nano Banana. Canva becomes Microsoft Designer. Suno becomes Lyria 3. The header shouts SAVE THIS LIST BEFORE IT DISAPPEARS and the caption promises you will stop overpaying for AI subscriptions.
Now read only the right-hand column, and ignore what each thing does. Ask one question instead: who owns it?
Nano Banana is Google – it is the nickname for the Gemini image model. Lyria 3 is Google DeepMind, delivered inside the Gemini app. NotebookLM is Google. Google AI Studio is, unsurprisingly, Google.
Four of the thirteen escape routes lead to the same building. Three of those four are the same product surface.
Keep going and it gets starker. Qwen is Alibaba. Kling AI is Kuaishou. CapCut is ByteDance. Microsoft Designer is Microsoft. The best-known thing called Voicebox is Meta research. That is nine of thirteen owned by five very large companies, with DeepSeek a well-funded sixth and only a couple of genuinely independent entries left on the card.
None of that makes the card wrong. Several of those tools are excellent and genuinely free. But “stop paying” is not what happened here. What happened is that you changed what you pay with and, more importantly, who you depend on – and the card has no column for that.
The card this post is about
Watch the original reel: “Save this list before it disappears”
Thirteen swaps, footed “Plans, limits and prices change often. Check each tool before you rely on it.” The table below reproduces every row as printed.
Three reasons a giant hands you something for nothing
Free from a four-person open-source project and free from a trillion-dollar platform are two completely different promises, and they fail in different ways. Here is the sorting the card does not do.
Diagram: four kinds of free, four different endings
| Kind of free | Why it is free | How it ends | What to watch | Rows on this card |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1. Shop window free tier of a paid ladder |
It sells you the paid tier, or the ecosystem the paid tier lives in | It shrinks. The free rung gets narrower as the paid rungs get built | The pricing page. Specifically, what moved out of the free column since last quarter | Google AI Studio, Microsoft Designer, NotebookLM, OpenRouter |
| 2. Land grab free to win the market first |
Market share now, monetisation later. Free is a strategy with an end date | It converts. One day the thing you built a workflow on has a price | Funding news and sudden feature gates. Generosity is a phase | DeepSeek, Qwen, Kling AI, Nano Banana, Lyria 3, CapCut |
| 3. Genuinely public open source or community-run |
Nobody is monetising you. It exists because people wanted it to exist | It goes quiet. Price is never the risk here – maintenance is | The newest commit or release date. Over a year old means plan a successor | LanguageTool |
| 4. Not actually available the anomaly |
It is a research result, a demo or a name, not a product you can open | It never starts. You cannot sign up | Click the link. The cheapest check and the one nobody runs | Voicebox – see the caveats below |
The practical value of that table is in the third column. A shop-window tool shrinks, a land-grab tool converts, and a public tool goes silent. If you know which kind you picked, you know which warning sign to watch for – and you stop being surprised.
All thirteen rows, with an ownership column added
Below is the full card. The first two columns after the number are the card’s own text, unedited. The last three are ours, and the fourth is the one the card has no room for.
| # | Don’t pay for | Use | Who owns it | Kind of free | Our note (not on the card) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | ChatGPT | DeepSeek | DeepSeek | Land grab | A real chat assistant with a free tier. Independent of the five giants, which on this card makes it unusual |
| 2 | Midjourney | Nano Banana | Land grab | “Nano Banana” is the nickname for Google’s Gemini image model. Free through the Gemini app, rate-limited, and the limits are Google’s to move | |
| 3 | Grammarly | LanguageTool | Independent / open source | Genuinely public | The one row on the card where nobody is monetising you. It also has a paid tier, but the core is open |
| 4 | ElevenLabs | Voicebox | Meta (research) | Not available | Meta announced Voicebox and said it would not release the model or code publicly, citing misuse risk. If the card means a different Voicebox, it does not say which |
| 5 | Runway | Kling AI | Kuaishou | Land grab | Free credits that refresh, then a queue and a paywall. Watch how far the daily allowance goes after a month |
| 6 | Grok Imagine | Qwen | Alibaba | Land grab | Alibaba’s model family. Genuinely capable; availability and limits differ a lot by country |
| 7 | Suno | Lyria 3 | Land grab | Google DeepMind’s music model, delivered inside the Gemini app. Short clips, and generating music is not the same as having the right to publish it | |
| 8 | Rundown AI | Sifu Yik | Not stated | — | Rundown AI is a newsletter. This row swaps a source of information, not a tool – and the card does not say what the replacement is |
| 9 | Canva | Microsoft Designer | Microsoft | Shop window | Free, and the front door of Microsoft 365. Template depth is the thing to compare, not the AI |
| 10 | Descript | CapCut | ByteDance | Land grab | Genuinely good and genuinely free today. Check its commercial-use terms before you monetise work made in it |
| 11 | API | OpenRouter | Independent | Shop window | “API” is a category, not a product you subscribe to. OpenRouter does carry 25+ free models at around 50 requests a day – everything else is pay-per-token, plus a fee on credit purchases |
| 12 | Notion AI | NotebookLM | Shop window | Excellent at turning your own sources into summaries. Note the product name moved recently – the same brand’s own 60-tools card calls it Gemini Notebook | |
| 13 | Lovable | Google AI Studio | Shop window | A developer playground, not an app builder. It is the free front end to the paid Gemini API – different job from Lovable |
What your stack looks like if you take the whole card
Suppose you are diligent. You go down all thirteen rows and switch every one. You now feel diversified – thirteen different tools, no subscriptions. Count the owners instead of the logos and a different picture appears.
| Owner | Rows | Which ones | What one policy change would cost you |
|---|---|---|---|
| 4 | Nano Banana, Lyria 3, NotebookLM, Google AI Studio | Your images, your music, your notes and your API access at once. Three of the four arrive through the same app | |
| Alibaba | 1 | Qwen | A model, and whatever you built on its free tier |
| Kuaishou | 1 | Kling AI | Your video generation |
| ByteDance | 1 | CapCut | Your editor – the one you actually cut in every week |
| Microsoft | 1 | Microsoft Designer | Your graphics |
| Meta | 1 | Voicebox | Nothing, because you could not use it anyway |
| Independent / open | 4 | DeepSeek, LanguageTool, OpenRouter, (Sifu Yik, unstated) | Spread across four unrelated parties – this is the only part of the stack that is actually diversified |
Four rows, one company, and three of them delivered through the Gemini app. That is not a criticism of Google’s tools – they are good, and the free tiers are real. It is a statement about the shape of your risk. The question is not “is this free?” but “how much of my week stops if one company changes one page?”
This is the same thing we got at from another angle in own versus borrow. When a tool is free, somebody is paying for it, and that somebody has a roadmap. Their roadmap is not your roadmap.
The headline and the footer are giving opposite instructions
The card says, in large yellow capitals: SAVE THIS LIST BEFORE IT DISAPPEARS.
The card also says, in small grey type at the bottom: “Plans, limits and prices change often. Check each tool before you rely on it.”
Both of those are on the same image, and they do not agree. If plans and prices change often, then the list is perishable – and saving is the wrong verb for perishable things. You do not save milk. The footer is telling you the list has a shelf life and the headline is telling you to put it in a drawer.
The urgency is also pointed at the wrong object. What disappears is not the list; the screenshot will sit in your saved folder for years. What disappears is the accuracy of row seven after the free tier moves. We found exactly that failure on a near-identical card: one of its eleven recommendations had closed over a year earlier, and the picture had no way to say so.
So invert it. The correct instruction is not “save this before it disappears”. It is “use one of these before it changes” – which is roughly what a sixty-tool card from the same brand gets right, by printing “pick one and use it today” on every single slide.
Four honest caveats
The footer is good and deserves credit. “Check each tool before you rely on it” is the single most useful sentence on the card, and most cards do not carry it. This post is an argument with the headline, not with the footer.
Big-platform free is not bad free. NotebookLM is genuinely excellent at what it does. CapCut is a serious editor. Microsoft Designer is free and works. The argument here is about concentration, not quality – and if four Google tools are the four best tools for your four jobs, taking all four is a defensible choice. It is only a bad choice when you make it without noticing you made it.
Generating is not licensing. Row seven swaps one music generator for another. Neither one automatically settles whether you may publish and monetise the result – that is in each tool’s terms, and it differs. The same applies to images on a thumbnail and to any synthetic voice, which platforms increasingly expect you to disclose.
This post is dated too. Everything in the last three columns was checked on 7 October 2026. Ownership changes, products get renamed – row twelve is already carrying an older name than the one the same brand uses elsewhere – and free tiers move. Free plans shrink and open source goes quiet; our check will age like everything else here. Open the link yourself.
The two-minute version of all this
Before you accept any free tool from a list, add one column the list left out. Not “what does it do” – the card already told you that – but “who owns it, and what does that mean when they change their mind?”
Three questions, in order. Who owns it? If you cannot answer in ten seconds, you are not ready to build on it. Which kind of free is it? Shop window shrinks, land grab converts, public goes quiet – pick which warning sign you will watch for. How many of my rows point at one company? If the answer is three or four, that is not a free stack, that is one vendor with four doors.
And then do the thing the footer asks and the headline does not: pick one row, open the link, and use it this week. A saved screenshot of thirteen tools has never once edited a video.
Learning a lot does not make anyone good. Doing a lot does.
If you want to be held to that, we run a free challenge at BANI Academy. There is no barrier to entry – you commit a small fee that is refunded when you finish, and the only requirement is that you actually do the work for the length of the challenge. Nobody was ever held back by paying for one subscription. Plenty of people have been held back by spending a month choosing one.
Which of the thirteen did you switch, and did you check who owns it? Tell us in the comments under the original reel.
More on building a channel for a global audience at mmoyoutube.com.
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