STEP 2 OF 7
Create a free AI account
A free account saves your chats so you can pick up where you left off. It also helps you understand the limits so they don’t surprise you.
YOUR ASSIGNMENT
Sign up for one (or more) free AI tool, check its privacy settings, and send your first message.
Sign up for an account
Any of these AI assistants will work, and what you learn carries over to all of them. Choose the one you’ll actually open, and stick with it for now.
- Open any of the AI assistants below.
- Use an email address you plan to keep for a long time — some platforms do not allow you to change your email address after you sign up.
- Find the Settings of your chosen platform and look for something like Data controls, Privacy, or Personalization. Many tools let you stop your chats from being used to train their models, and show what Memory keeps. The names differ by tool and change often.
Pros: Most widely known, so there’s lots of help and tutorials online. It’s versatile and has a free tier, with voice, image, and file features.
Cons: It can sound confident when it’s wrong. Free-tier limits and features shift often, and its default tone can be generic or overly agreeable.
Updated Oct. 28, 2026
Pros: Strong at writing that sounds natural, and good at working with long documents like resumes and job listings. It tends to be careful and clear in how it explains things.
Cons: Free usage limits can run out mid-task. It’s less well known, and it has fewer built-in extras than some competitors, such as image generation.
Updated Oct. 28, 2026
Pros: Integrates with Google tools (Gmail, Docs, Drive), which is handy if job seekers already live in Google. It also has a free tier and good live-info access through Google Search.
Cons: Quality can feel less consistent across tasks. The best features may require a paid plan or a Google account, and the privacy settings are harder to follow.
Updated Oct. 28, 2026
Pros: Built for research. It cites its sources, which makes fact-checking easy, and it’s good for company research, salary ranges, and industry questions.
Cons: It’s less suited to drafting resumes, cover letters, or longer writing. It works best as a search tool, not a writing partner, and the free tier is limited.
Updated Oct. 28, 2026
Free accounts have limits
TOKENS
AI reads and writes in small chunks called tokens. A token is a short piece of a word. As a rule of thumb, 100 tokens is about 75 words.
Everything counts: your question, the documents you paste in, the AI’s answer, and the earlier messages in the same chat. Every free tool limits how much you can use. The exact numbers change often, so check your tool’s help page if you hit a wall. The limits usually look like this:
- How many messages you can send in a window of time, often a few hours. When you hit it, you wait for it to reset or switch to another tool.
- How long a chat can get before the AI starts forgetting the beginning.
- Which version of the AI you get. It may switch to a smaller one when you’re busy.
How to make your free account go further
SHORTER ISN’T ALWAYS BETTER
Cut the rambling, not the facts. A prompt that includes the right details often gets a better answer than one trimmed to the bone. Asking for a set number of results (“give me 5”) and a length (“under 200 words”) saves messages.
INSTEAD OF
TRY
“Tell me about jobs I could do.”
“Give me 5 job titles that fit my skills, one sentence each.”
Asking for everything in one message
One task per message, in small steps
One long chat for the whole search
A new chat for each task
Pasting every document every time
Pasting only the documents that task needs