Working with no budget

64% of the organisations surveyed for this project said cost blocks them from using AI tools, and 29% can only use free tiers. One is blocked by payment and access restrictions in its country: no card that works, whatever the price.

What free costs you

On a free tier, your text is far more likely to be stored, read by staff, and used to train the next version of the model. Paid tiers of the same product often promise the opposite in writing. One vendor’s own terms say human reviewers may read free-tier input, and that you should not submit confidential information to it: staying safe.

So free tiers are for material you would be willing to publish.

Zero cost, and nothing leaves your computer

A tool that runs on your own machine needs no account, no card, no country and no per-use payment, and nothing you type leaves the room. For an organisation blocked by payment restrictions, this is the only category that works at all.

Whisper, running on your own computer turns recorded speech into text without the recording going anywhere. It downloads once, then needs no internet connection.

• transcribe an Arabic interview offline with Whisper
• live offline speech translation

The limits: you need a reasonably modern computer with a few gigabytes of free disk space, it is slower than a cloud service, someone has to install it once, and quality varies sharply by language. Kurdish Sorani in particular is poor with this model. The tool page says exactly how poor, and why.

Zero cost, on someone else’s computer

Free tiers of hosted assistants, including ChatGPT, are enough for real work on public material: drafting, summarising a published report, rewriting a paragraph, translating something already published.

No limits or prices here. They change every few months and this page will be read for a year. The tools catalogue marks which tools have a free tier and what it is actually enough for, with the date each entry was last checked. For today’s exact limits, follow the vendor link on the tool’s page.

Two traps to check before you build a workflow around a free tier:

• Paid plans often need a card issued outside Iraq. The free tier may work while the upgrade path does not.
• Some tools ask for a phone number even for a free account. That is a real cost for someone who does not want their work account tied to their personal number.

Donated and discounted software

These programmes verify that you are a registered organisation, then give you donated or discounted software. They usually ask for registration documents, and country coverage varies. Check that yours is included before you plan around it.

• TechSoup Global, the main clearing house for donated nonprofit software, working through partner organisations in many countries.
• Google for Nonprofits
• Microsoft for Nonprofits

Several AI vendors now have nonprofit pricing of their own. Check the vendor’s own “nonprofits” page rather than a list here that would rot, and ask other organisations in your network what they were actually granted. Approval is less predictable than the pages suggest.

What no amount of free can buy

• Privacy. A free tier is the tier most likely to read and keep your text. See staying safe.
• Language quality. Free or paid, these tools are weakest in exactly the languages this site is written in. See translation.
• A reviewer. Someone still has to check the output against the original. That time is the real cost of AI, and no tier includes it.

If you have no budget at all

1. Write your rules first. It costs nothing and needs no tool: write your organisation’s AI rules in one hour.
2. Anything sensitive stays on your own computer. Use the offline tools above, and nothing else, for testimony, case files and anything about a named person.
3. Anything public can use a free tier, after you have taken the identifying details out anyway, because habits do not survive being applied only sometimes.
4. Check every fact against the original. Free tiers hallucinate exactly as confidently as paid ones.