The left-hand column
You commented FREE, so here it is — every tool in my stack that costs nothing, with links, plus the bit that didn't fit in a twenty-second reel: why each one actually earns its place.
1. NVIDIA NIM — API keys to 80+ models
Free account, no card, no trial countdown. Pick a model, grab a key, done in about four minutes.
Why they give it away: NVIDIA want their hardware to be the default everyone builds on. Free inference is cheap marketing for that. It's a strategy, not a loss-leader that expires — which is why this one is safe to build on.
Use it for: anything high-volume and low-stakes. Classification, extraction, bulk rewriting, first drafts.
2. Kimi — front end
→ kimi.com
Free, no card, no waitlist. In July 2026 Kimi K3 took the number one spot on Frontend Code Arena with 1,679 points, ahead of Claude Fable 5 — the first open-weight model ever to lead that board, and a seventeen-place jump from their previous model.
The honest caveat: it won six of the seven categories and lost gaming. Ask it hard maths and it falls over. It's a front-end specialist, not a general upgrade.
3. OpenCut — video editing
Free, open source, MIT licensed. 78,000+ stars, and still shipping updates this week — not an abandoned side project.
The part that matters: it edits locally. Your footage never leaves your device. If you cut client work, unpublished material, or anything under NDA, that alone is the argument.
And it can't be taken back. MIT means anyone can fork it. The day someone paywalls it, the community ships the identical editor without one.
4. Claude skills — all of them
Every skill I run costs nothing. They're just files. The real cost is deciding which ones are worth the context, not the licence.
5. The no-card test
Not one thing above asks for payment details. That's the actual test — if it wants a card "just to verify", it isn't free, it's a trial.
What I pay for, and why
Two subscriptions: Claude and ChatGPT. That's the whole right-hand column.
The logic is simple. Pay for the thing you sit inside every day. Everything else — model access, editing, front-end builds, skills — has a free version now that genuinely holds up. Most people have it backwards: three subscriptions for tools they open twice a month, and the cheap tier on the one they live in.
The order I'd set it up in
NVIDIA first — four minutes, and it immediately takes load off whatever you're paying per token for.
OpenCut second — switching editors is the one with a learning curve, so do it before you need it, not during a deadline.
Kimi last — wait until you have a real front-end job to throw at it, so you can judge the output against something you already trust.
Reply and tell me what's still on your paid list. If three people are paying for the same thing, that's the next issue.