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 pages and started actually tracking the limits.

That turned into a spreadsheet. The spreadsheet turned into a proper dataset. The dataset turned into a library of 135+ AI coding tools at Tolop But before I get to that, here is what I actually found.

"Free" means at least five completely different things

This is the core problem.…