Free NotebookLM Alternatives
Eight verified free NotebookLM alternatives - ChatGPT's file uploads and seven free vector databases and embedding APIs - with limits and card rules.
Esta sección está en inglés.
NotebookLM, which Google’s help center now documents as Gemini Notebook, is a research notebook: upload PDFs, websites, YouTube links, audio or Google Docs, then chat over the sources with in-line citations and turn them into study guides, mind maps or audio overviews. Its free usage is compute-based and refreshes every 5 hours until you reach a weekly limit - but the standard limits that come without a paid Google AI plan are not published as numbers, and Google states they may change. The free alternatives below play for durability and control instead: ChatGPT’s free plan for chat over limited file uploads, and seven free building blocks - Postgres with pgvector, managed vector databases, and embedding APIs - to run a NotebookLM-style assistant of your own. Every row is a live offer from the same catalog as the free AI coding tools directory; the free vector databases guide and the free embeddings API guide cover the build steps.
Los datos de las ofertas se verifican y se muestran en inglés.
| Opción | Qué es gratis | Tarjeta | La letra pequeña |
|---|---|---|---|
| ChatGPT Free Plan | Free tier | No | Only everyday text chats are unlimited; file uploads, image generation, voice, and deep research have separate usage limits. |
| Supabase Free Plan | 0.5 GB | No | Free projects are paused after 1 week of inactivity, the database is capped at 500 MB, and there are no automatic backups. |
| Weaviate Cloud Free Plan | Free tier | No | One cluster per user with a single collection and 100,000 objects; no backups or replication on the free plan. |
| Pinecone Starter Plan | 2 GB | No | AWS us-east-1 only, 1 project and 2 users, community support only; going past the monthly read/write units means upgrading to Builder ($20/month flat) or Standard ($50/month minimum). |
| Qdrant Cloud Free Tier | Free tier | No | Single node only, no high availability or automatic backups; unused free clusters are suspended after 1 week and deleted after 4 weeks of inactivity. |
| Zilliz Cloud Free Cluster | 5 GB | No | Up to 5 collections and 2.5M vCUs a month; advanced features need the Serverless or Dedicated trial. |
| Voyage AI Free Embedding and Reranking Tokens | 200,000,000 tokens | No | Without a payment method you are held to 3 requests and 10K tokens a minute; the published 2,000 RPM limits need a card on file (Usage Tier 1). Older model generations get no free tokens. |
| Mixedbread Free Starter Credits | $5 | No | The $5 credits are one-time only with no monthly renewal; once spent you must add credits from billing settings or upgrade to Scale. |
Las 8 opciones, en detalle
ChatGPT Free Plan
Free web search, file and image analysis, image generation, and writing tools
- Unlimited text chats (model not specified)
- Limited file uploads
- Limited image generation
- Limited voice chats
La letra pequeña: Only everyday text chats are unlimited; file uploads, image generation, voice, and deep research have separate usage limits.
Supabase Free Plan
Free Postgres with pgvector, auth, storage and edge functions on 2 projects
- 2 active free projects
- 500 MB database size per project
- Shared CPU, 500 MB RAM
- 50,000 monthly active users
La letra pequeña: Free projects are paused after 1 week of inactivity, the database is capped at 500 MB, and there are no automatic backups.
Weaviate Cloud Free Plan
Always-free managed Weaviate cluster: 100K objects, embeddings included
- 1 cluster per user (shared deployment)
- 100,000 objects
- 1 GB memory, 10 GB disk
- 1 collection, up to 3 tenants
La letra pequeña: One cluster per user with a single collection and 100,000 objects; no backups or replication on the free plan.
Pinecone Starter Plan
Free Pinecone vector database: 2 GB storage, 5 serverless indexes
- Up to 2 GB storage, 5 serverless indexes, 100 namespaces per index
- Up to 1M read units and 2M write units per month
- Up to 1 GB egress per month
- 1 project, up to 2 users
La letra pequeña: AWS us-east-1 only, 1 project and 2 users, community support only; going past the monthly read/write units means upgrading to Builder ($20/month flat) or Standard ($50/month minimum).
Qdrant Cloud Free Tier
Free-forever Qdrant vector database cluster, 1 GB RAM, no credit card
- 1 single-node cluster: 0.5 vCPU, 1 GB RAM, 4 GB disk
- About 1M vectors at 768 dimensions (vendor estimate)
- Limited choice of cloud providers and regions
- Only manual snapshots and restores via API
La letra pequeña: Single node only, no high availability or automatic backups; unused free clusters are suspended after 1 week and deleted after 4 weeks of inactivity.
Zilliz Cloud Free Cluster
Free managed Milvus cluster: 5 GB storage, 2.5M vCUs per month
- 5 GB storage (about 1M 768-dim vectors)
- 2.5M vCUs per month
- Up to 5 collections
- Community support (Slack)
La letra pequeña: Up to 5 collections and 2.5M vCUs a month; advanced features need the Serverless or Dedicated trial.
Voyage AI Free Embedding and Reranking Tokens
Voyage AI by MongoDB gives every account 200M free tokens on most models
- 200M free tokens each: voyage-4-large, voyage-4, voyage-4-lite, voyage-code-4, voyage-context-4, rerank-3, rerank-3-lite
- 50M free tokens: voyage-finance-2, voyage-law-2, voyage-code-2
- voyage-multimodal-3.5: 200M text tokens and 150B pixels
- No free tokens for older models (voyage-3.x, voyage-context-3, voyage-multimodal-3, rerank-2.x)
La letra pequeña: Without a payment method you are held to 3 requests and 10K tokens a minute; the published 2,000 RPM limits need a card on file (Usage Tier 1). Older model generations get no free tokens.
Mixedbread Free Starter Credits
$5 in one-time Mixedbread usage credits, no credit card
- $5 one-time credits per workspace
- 100 queries/minute; 6,000 uploads/minute for ingestion
- 3 Stores on the Starter tier (the Scale tier lists 10,000)
- 3 workspace users
La letra pequeña: The $5 credits are one-time only with no monthly renewal; once spent you must add credits from billing settings or upgrade to Scale.
Gratis para siempre si lo alojas tú
Proyectos de código abierto que hacen lo mismo en tu propio hardware, sin cuota.
- Open WebUI (Open WebUI License (branding clause))
- Qdrant (Apache-2.0)
- Text Embeddings Inference (Apache-2.0) - CPU, or an NVIDIA GPU with CUDA compute capability 7.5 or newer
Preguntas frecuentes
Esta sección está en inglés.
- Is NotebookLM free?
- Yes, with a Google account. Google’s help center now documents the product as Gemini Notebook; usage limits are compute-based and refresh every 5 hours until you reach a weekly limit. Without a paid Google AI plan you get the standard limits, and Google does not publish a number for them - only that limits may change. Details were read from Google’s help center on November 1, 2026.
- What is the best free alternative to NotebookLM?
- For chat grounded in working with sources rather than building anything, ChatGPT’s free plan: unlimited text chats with limited file uploads plus web search. For keeping your sources in one place long term, Supabase’s free plan is the one-box route: Postgres with pgvector plus auth, storage and edge functions on two projects. Weaviate’s always-free cluster is the closest managed analog, with embeddings included.
- Can I build my own NotebookLM-style RAG for free?
- Yes, and no card is needed anywhere in the stack. Embeddings: Voyage AI grants 200 million free tokens per model (3 requests and 10K tokens a minute without a payment method) and Mixedbread starts you with $5 of one-time credits. Vector storage: Pinecone’s free plan holds 2 GB across 5 serverless indexes, Zilliz 5 GB, Qdrant a 1 GB cluster (about 1 million vectors at 768 dimensions), and Weaviate 100,000 objects with embeddings included.
- Do these NotebookLM alternatives need a credit card?
- No - none of the eight rows asks for a card. The catch sits elsewhere: Supabase pauses a free project after a week of inactivity, Qdrant suspends after a week and deletes after four weeks unused, and Pinecone’s free plan runs on AWS us-east-1 only.
- How current is this comparison?
- Every row is generated from the aifree.dev catalog, whose Verified offers are re-checked monthly. Vector database and embedding allowances shift quietly - collections shrink, inactivity deletions kick in - so a row changes or disappears when the vendor does.
Guías paso a paso
- Free Alternatives to ChatGPT Plus Features (en inglés)
- Free OpenAI API Access in 2026: What's Actually Free (en inglés)
- Free Embeddings and Reranking APIs in 2026 (en inglés)
- Free Vector Databases for RAG in 2026 (en inglés)
- Free AI APIs With No Credit Card in 2026 (en inglés)
- Free AI for Teachers in 2026: Lesson Planning, Grading and Slides (en inglés)
- How to Run an AI Agent for $0 in 2026: Models, Search and Vector DB (en inglés)
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- Free AI Chat Without Login in 2026: Duck.ai, ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot and HuggingChat (en inglés)
- Free AI for Data Analysis in 2026: ChatGPT, Claude, Google Colab and Kaggle (en inglés)
- Free AI for Job Seekers in 2026: Resume, Cover Letter and Interview Practice (en inglés)
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