We opened 722 free AI tool demos. 268 of them were dead.
Not a link roundup — every tool was opened and checked. As of 2026-08-19. All figures are computed from our live catalogue, so this page is never out of date.
1. One in three "try it free" demos is already dead
We opened 722 hosted demos. 268 of them (37%) failed to load: 130 crashed at runtime, 104 had been paused by their authors, 32 could not start at all.
The surprise is the 104 that were paused deliberately. They did not break — the authors shut them down. Free compute quotas are finite, so popularity itself can end a demo. "Published" does not mean "still works." The older a roundup article is, the higher this rate climbs.
2. Most of them need no special skills
Put the other way round: only 26% run entirely on your own machine. Everything else ships your input to somebody's server. That matters the moment you feed it a recorded meeting, a contract, or a customer list.
3. You cannot judge commercial use from the licence name
We read 571 licence texts and found restrictions in 74of them. For hosted demos the answer depends on the model running inside, not on the page's own licence, so we read those terms too.
The trap: a licence can say non-commercialand still allow commercial use of what you make with it. FLUX is exactly that case — the restriction covers the model itself, while the current licence (revised 25 Nov 2025) states outputs may be used for any purpose including commercial ones, with one exception: you may not use them to train a competing model. The reverse also happens — licences without "non-commercial" in the name that still restrict the outputs.
4. Active, but not all of them
Median time since the last update is 76 days. 35% were updated within the last 30 days, while 6% have not moved in over two years. We have delisted 20 tools for being broken, non-compliant or abandoned, and we publish the reason for each.
5. It is not all famous projects
Median GitHub star count is 1,007; 570 tools (50%) sit below 1,000. A low star count usually means a narrow purpose, not poor quality — and narrow-purpose tools are exactly the ones nobody has written about yet.
Method and limits
Scope is the 1,144 tools listed on Mirondo as of 2026-08-19. Hosted demos were requested and their state classified automatically. Licences were judged by reading the GitHub LICENSE text and the model distributor's terms. Setup requirements were judged by reading official documentation. Anything we could not determine is recorded as not verified rather than guessed.
The catalogue is weighted towards tools that are free to use, and does not cover paid services exhaustively. Read this as the shape of the free AI tool landscape, not of the market as a whole. States change daily, so cite with the date.
Using these numbers
Please do. CC BY 4.0 — attribution is the only requirement. Machine-readable source data lives at /data/tools.json and /data/verification.json.
Suggested citation: "Mirondo (https://mirondo.net), surveyed 2026-08-19". A Japanese version of this page is at /report.