The free stack that arrived quietly
Google now ships a collection of AI tools that replace software businesses pay for every month. Most of them are free and experimental. Most professionals have no idea they exist.
This post covers the ones that matter for a working business, not a hobby project. For each tool: what it does, what it replaces, and the honest limit.
Marketing
Pomelli (labs.google.com/pomelli) Paste your website URL. It reads your brand, then generates on-brand social posts and ads. It stores a Business DNA profile so output stays consistent across campaigns. Replaces: design tool subscriptions for social content, and the first draft of ad copy. Limit: it is a first draft machine. A human still approves what ships.
Mixboard (labs.google.com/mixboard) An AI moodboard. Describe a direction and it generates visual inspiration boards for campaigns, pitches and brand work. Replaces: Pinterest rabbit holes and paid moodboard tools. Limit: inspiration, not production assets.
Office and productivity
Google CC (labs.google/cc) Email productivity built on Gemini. Drafts, summarises and triages mail inside Gmail. Replaces: the paid email-assistant category. Limit: best inside Gmail, not a standalone client.
NotebookLM (notebooklm.google) Upload sources: PDFs, articles, transcripts, notes. It answers from your sources, links claims to citations, and generates audio overviews. Free plan: 100 notebooks, 50 sources each, up to 500,000 words per source. Replaces: note apps, research folders, and a chunk of the paid research-assistant category. Limit: audio overviews are impressive but not always accurate. Verify before you publish anything generated from it.
Gemini Canvas (gemini.google.com/app) An interactive editor inside Gemini that generates working apps, infographics, quizzes, dashboards and presentations from a prompt, then lets you edit the result. Replaces: basic presentation tools and one-off internal apps. Limit: the free tier is capable; the model behind it gets stronger with a paid plan.
Building
Google AI Studio Build (aistudio.google.com/apps) Vibe coding in the browser. Describe an app, get a working project, download it for local development. Replaces: paid vibe-coding tools and early prototyping services. Limit: fine for prototypes and internal tools. Production security and data handling are still your problem.
Google Opal (opal.google) Build AI mini-apps and automated workflows in plain English, no code. Includes an agent that plans tasks, picks tools and executes multi-step workflows, with Workspace integration. Replaces: a slice of automation platforms and internal app builders. Limit: workflows can be fragile. Document what it automates before you depend on it.
Antigravity (antigravity.google) Google’s agent-first IDE. Coordinates multiple AI agents across a codebase, with Gemini 3 Pro and Flash. Free during public preview. Replaces: paid AI coding assistants and some junior development work. Google folded Gemini Code Assist for Individuals into Antigravity in June 2026, so this is now the free copilot path too. Limit: preview terms. Do not point it at production secrets.
Gemini CLI (geminicli.com) The Gemini models in your terminal. Free tier: 1,000 requests per day with a Google account. Replaces: paid CLI coding assistants. Limit: terminal comfort required.
Cloud free tiers
Translation (cloud.google.com/translate) 500,000 characters free per month, no expiration. Production-grade translation for apps and documents. Replaces: translation subscriptions and agencies for routine volume. Limit: custom-model and batch features sit behind the free tier.
Vision, Speech-to-Text, Text-to-Speech, Natural Language (cloud.google.com) Cloud Vision: 1,000 units free monthly. Speech-to-Text: 60 minutes free monthly. Text-to-Speech: 1 to 4 million characters free monthly. Natural Language: 5,000 units free monthly. Replaces: per-seat API subscriptions for OCR, transcription and sentiment work. Limit: rate limits, no service-level guarantee. Fine for internal tools.
Compute Engine + Cloud Storage (cloud.google.com) A free e2-micro VM and 5 GiB of storage, monthly. Enough to run a small internal service. Replaces: the first paid server. Limit: US regions only on the free tier. India deployment needs paid regions, which matters if data residency applies to you.
The honest section
A few things to keep in mind before you rebuild your stack on free tools.
Experimental means change. Labs tools arrive and disappear without notice. Never make a customer-facing process depend on a Labs experiment.
Free tiers have limits by design. They are acquisition funnels. The generous ones (Gemini CLI, NotebookLM) hold up under daily use. The API tiers are for tinkering, not production load.
Data residency still applies. Free tiers run on Google infrastructure in configured regions. For a business handling customer or employee data in India, check where the data lands and what the terms say before feeding it anything sensitive. This is not a Google-specific warning. It applies to every free tool on this list.
Your stack, not a promise. A tool that saves two hours a week is better than a tool that replaces a role on paper. Measure the hours, then keep the tool.
What we actually use
For transparency: this is the part of the Google stack Creative Stack AI runs on today. Antigravity for grounded web research, where a plain chatbot would invent sources. NotebookLM for research synthesis, every working day. Stitch for designing website screens before any code exists. Google Analytics for traffic. The rest of this list we have tested but not adopted, which is its own kind of answer: a tool earns a place by saving hours, not by being free.
The principle is the same one we sell in the 90-day sprint: adopt free tools where they hold, pay only where the work demands it, and document what runs where. If you want a structured audit of which AI tools are safe and worth adopting for your team, with a prioritised plan, that is what StackGuard does.
Start with the free stack. Then decide what is worth paying for.