Straight answers · 2 min
Free AI tools actually worth having — and the ones that waste your afternoon.
A short, ruthless review of the £0 shelf, limited — by our own rules — to things we actually use, including four that are ours (declared openly, judge accordingly).
Straight answers · Updated 24 September 2026
The rule this review runs on
We only review tools we use ourselves. This isn't a long list of forty tools we found online. If a tool is ours, we'll say so, and you can take our opinion with a pinch of salt. What remains are the tools we'd genuinely recommend for a cash-tight business to use before spending a pound with anyone, including us.
Worth having
The big assistants' free tiers (ChatGPT, Claude
We use both). With the prompt pattern from the linked guide, the free tiers alone dissolve real drafting work: emails, posts, summaries, replies. Caveats: limits, and the data rule — nothing sensitive into free consumer tiers.
Your phone's dictation plus an assistant
The humble combination that turns drive-home voice notes into tidy quotes and follow-ups. Costs nothing; used here constantly.
Google Business Profile (free, not really 'AI', still the highest-return listing in local search). Hours, photos, posts, review replies — for a local business this outperforms most paid tools per minute invested.
Ours, declared plainly
The Business Score (your public footprint, scored honestly), the director-ID checker (reads the live register against the November 2026 deadline), Tender Radar (live public contracts matched to what you do), and the AI-visibility checker (what ChatGPT and friends actually say about you). All free, no card, and each exists partly to prove our engine works — that's the declared bias.
The afternoon-wasters — patterns, not names
We won't criticise products we haven't used. Instead, we'll describe their types, which last longer. The thin wrapper is a paid app with a basic model, a fresh look, and a subscription. Test it by asking if a free assistant plus a saved prompt does the same. The content mill offers '30 days of posts in one click', creating generic content that nobody wants. It's invisible twice. The magic-button audit gives free 'AI reports' to scare you into a call, listing forty generic issues with no ranking. Be wary of anything 'free' that really costs your customer data. Our data-map guide shows what to check before pasting. The pattern is clear: a real tool saves a specific hour; a waster only makes you feel guilty.
Free tool · runs right here
Free Business Score
See how your business looks online — findability, website health, reviews and more — with the few fixes worth doing first.
No sign-up · instant · it’s me that runs it — the same tool, live on this site.
Declared bias and all: the free score is the fastest way to find out which fixes — free or otherwise — your business actually needs first.
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