Best free AI tools for traders and investors: what $0 actually gets you, plan by plan

'Free to start' can mean a usable tool or a demo with a meter. Before you pay for an AI subscription, it is worth knowing how far each free plan goes. All plan details below were read on the vendors' pricing pages on October 14, 2026; limits change often. Six of these tools have their own pages in our AI Tool Index: LuxAlgo Quant, Composer, Danelfin, TradingView, TrendSpider and Trade Ideas.

The free plans, side by side

Sources: Claude, ChatGPT, LuxAlgo, Composer, Danelfin, Shortcut, TradingView, TrendSpider, Trade Ideas.

For reading filings and earnings: the general chatbots

The free tiers of Claude and ChatGPT are the most generous on paper, and the published tests say free is fine for a first pass but brittle. In one dated test of earnings-day work, ChatGPT's free plan hit its model limit mid-session and switched to a less capable model before the last questions. In Daloopa's 500-question retrieval benchmark, the best general chatbot matched the exact reported figure 63.8% of the time nContext: n=500 single-number questions · test run date not shown, GPT-5 Thinking era models · Daloopa benchmark · margin: not disclosed. Free or paid, the habit that matters is the same: paste the filing and check the number.

For charts and code: LuxAlgo Free and TradingView Basic

LuxAlgo's free plan includes its AI coding agent Quant with 500 monthly credits, shared with its backtesting assistant and reset on the first of each month. LuxAlgo does not publish how many credits a request uses, so the practical test is to watch the gauge for a week. TradingView's free Basic plan does not include the AI Copilot, which one reviewer tested only after buying a paid plan plus the add-on.

For automating a rule: Composer Starter

Composer's free Starter plan automates one strategy, allows unlimited backtests in its no-code editor and includes its 'Trade with AI' assistant, metered by a weekly token allowance whose size Composer does not publish. One reviewer found about four of six AI prompts produced a workable draft. Default backtest slippage is 1 basis point, which AgentTrading calls optimistic for leveraged ETFs.

For AI stock scores: Danelfin Free

Danelfin's free plan gives 10 stock or ETF reports a month, the top 10 of each ranking, a daily top-10 newsletter and only the top alpha signals behind each AI Score. Danelfin's own footer says its AI 'calculates stocks' probabilities of beating the market based on past market behavior' and 'does not calculate or predict actual results', and that illustrative portfolios are backtested. We do not repeat backtested figures.

For spreadsheets: Shortcut Free

Shortcut's free plan gives 20 credits a week, and its own page says a message typically costs 2 to 15 credits, so that may be only a handful of requests. In Wall Street Prep's modeling test, Shortcut scored 5.9 out of 10 against 6.4 for a low-tier human analyst (one task, one grader team), and invented historical figures when left to fetch its own data.

Where free stops

• Chart copilots. Neither TradingView's Copilot nor TrendSpider's Sidekick has a free path; TrendSpider's 25 included messages come with a paid plan.
• Day-trading signals. Trade Ideas' Holly signals are only on its top plan.
• Usage disclosure. Credits and tokens are rarely translated into a number of requests. That makes the free tier the cheapest way to measure your own usage before you buy.

A sensible free stack

A general chatbot for reading filings you paste in, a free charting plan for levels you check yourself, and one free tool for the job you do most (coding, automating or scoring). Upgrade only the one that runs out first, and note the renewal price, not just the introductory one.