The "Free" AI Coding Tool Lie - What the Limits Actually Look Like in 2026

I got burned three times before I started keeping notes. The pattern was always the same. Find an AI coding tool. See "free" on the landing page. Spend a weekend integrating it, learning the shortcuts, building it into my workflow. Then three days into real use - wall. Either a paywall I didn't see coming, a credit system I didn't understand, or the sudden realization that "free" meant I was paying Anthropic directly through my own API key anyway. After the third time I stopped trusting landing