I launched two free AI tools at midnight, and by 9:06 that morning strangers had spent the $5 a day I’d set aside for them. The cap in the server code did what it was there for, and the spending log showed what each AI engine cost per call.
Both went up on GEO Search Console, my set of free tools for AI search, and both were David Quaid’s ideas. The AI Visibility Checker asks whether Claude’s search, ChatGPT and Common Crawl can fetch a page, whether it’s in their search, and what your robots.txt tells each one. The Query Fan-Out Tool shows the searches ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini run for a prompt, and where your site ranks on Google for each one.
How the two free AI tools launched
The two free AI tools launched around midnight Mountain time, at the start of October 7, 2026. Every paid check on the site draws from one pot: $5 per UTC day, enforced on the server. Once the pot is empty, paid checks are refused until midnight UTC, which is 6 PM where I live.
I didn’t find out from an alert. Around noon I ran a single test of a new search key, and my own site refused it. The day’s $5 was already gone.
Who spent the $5
Who spent the $5 was nearly all strangers, and not one bot. I opened the database and read totals only: 62 different IP addresses had used the AI tools, and 47 had used the free checks. Between them they’d asked about 212 different topics, from supplements and voice-over to tai chi, a Turkish clinic and UK tuition.
The timing told the rest. Most of it came in a burst from 7 to 9 AM Mountain time, with 216 AI calls in the 8 AM hour alone, out of 258 for the day. The cap tripped at about 9:06, and for the next nine hours every paid check on the site was refused. Not one visitor signed up for email reports.
A burst like that from 62 addresses looks like someone shared the link somewhere. That’s my read, not a finding: the database keeps no referrer, so I can’t say where.
Where the $5 went, engine by engine
Where the $5 went, engine by engine, was the part worth keeping. The AI answers run through DataForSEO’s API: Claude Haiku 4.5 with web search, Gemini and ChatGPT, plus Google’s top 10 for each search the engines ran.
| Engine | Calls | Spend | Cents per call |
|---|---|---|---|
| Claude | 97 | $2.33 | 2.4 |
| Gemini | 67 | $2.10 | 3.1 |
| ChatGPT | 94 | $0.38 | 0.4 |
| Google results | 74 | $0.20 | 0.27 |
Claude cost the most in total, and Gemini cost the most per call. ChatGPT answered nearly as many calls as Claude for about a sixth of the money.
ChatGPT took nearly as many calls as Claude for a sixth of the money.
Per check, one Fan-Out prompt on all three engines comes to about 6 cents in AI calls, plus about a quarter cent for each Google search it looks up, so 6 to 7 cents a run. An AI Visibility check came to about 4.3 cents a page once the Brave key went in at noon: three Brave lookups for 1.5 cents, one Claude call and one ChatGPT call. At that rate, $5 covers about 116 page checks a day.
What I changed the same day
What I changed the same day was the cost of a run, not the size of the cap. The free-check pot stayed at $5.
- Fan-Out went to one run by default, with a button to run it twice more. Pressing it reuses the first run from cache, so that one isn’t paid for twice.
- The daily limit per connection dropped from 30 AI answers to 12.
- By that afternoon, Google sign-in and a Cloudflare Turnstile check were live. Anonymous visitors got six AI answers a day and could draw at most $3 of the $5; signed-in visitors got 30.
That evening, bulk lists for signed-in users got a $5 daily pot of their own, separate from the free checks.
How I read the numbers
How I read the numbers took one pass over the tools’ database, totals only, the same day.
- Tools
- AI Visibility Checker and Query Fan-Out Tool, live from around midnight Mountain time, October 7, 2026
- Cap
- $5 of paid checks per UTC day, enforced on the server
- Engines
- Claude Haiku 4.5 with web search, Gemini and ChatGPT, plus Google results, all through DataForSEO’s API
- Data
- The day’s totals from the tools’ own database, read at about 12:20 PM; no per-person rows opened
What launch morning taught me about free AI tools
What launch morning taught me about free AI tools fits in four habits.
Put a hard daily cap in the server before launch, not after. Mine turned a surprise into a $5 lesson.
Price every engine per call before you pick the defaults. Inside one tool, one engine cost about eight times what another did per call.
Cache what the terms let you cache. Fan-Out reuses its first run from cache. Brave’s terms rule out caching its results.
Log where visitors come from. I can tell you what 62 addresses asked about, and nothing about how they found the page. What it cost to build four more tools for the same site is a separate post.
Sources
- AI Visibility Checker (GEO Search Console)
- Query Fan-Out Tool (GEO Search Console)