What you actually get free in 2026: Moises, Chordify, LALAL and us

Every tool in this category says it's free. They mean noticeably different things by it, and the difference only shows up after you've uploaded something and started caring about the answer.

It helps to notice that "free tier" hides three separate limits, and that they're not equally annoying:

1. Access — which tools you're allowed to use at all. This is the lock icon next to the feature you came for.
2. Volume — how many songs you can run before the tier is spent.
3. Size — how large a file, and how long a track, you may bring.

Almost every suite in music AI limits the first one. That's the standard software-as-a-service shape, and there's nothing dishonest about it: the free tier is an advertisement for the subscription, so the parts worth subscribing for are the parts it holds back. You get chords but not the good chord model, stems but not the interesting stems, a result but not the export.

We went the other way, and this post is mostly about what that means in practice — including where it costs you something, because a "we give everything away" post that turns out to have an asterisk is worse than no post.

The shape of a suite free tier

If you've tried the well-known all-in-one apps, the pattern will be familiar. You sign up, because there's no way in without an account. You get a monthly count of songs rather than a daily one, which sounds similar and isn't — spend it on day two and you wait three weeks. Long tracks come back shortened. And the features that made you look in the first place, the cleaner separation model or the extra instrument stems or the higher-quality render, are the ones sitting behind the upgrade button.

Moises, Chordify and LALAL.AI each do a version of this. The specific numbers differ and they change, so this post deliberately doesn't quote them — check their plan pages, they're the only source that's current. What's stable is the structure: an account is mandatory, the allowance resets monthly, and capability is tiered.

It's a reasonable business. It's just worth recognising it for what it is before you conclude that the free version of a tool was disappointing. Often the free version was never the tool.

What a free ChordSonic account opens

Everything. That's the short version, and here's the long one so you can check it rather than take our word for it.

Chords, on the best setting we have. Not a reduced model with the good one behind a badge — the same chord detection our paid plans use. Our pipeline separates the harmonic content from drums and vocals before it looks for chords, which is a meaningful accuracy difference on dense mixes, and that behaviour isn't tiered either. Extended chords — sevenths, suspensions — are on for everyone.

Key and tempo. Detected from the audio, on any track you upload, with the chord chart lined up to the beat.

Stem separation. Vocals, drums, bass and the rest of the mix, as separate files you can download. This is the same engine behind our stem splitter, vocal remover and karaoke maker — they're views onto one operation, not a ladder of products.

Notes, as MIDI. Transcription from audio into a MIDI file you can open in a DAW, with a beat grid, so it lands on bars instead of floating. Covered in more depth in our guide to converting audio to MIDI.

Track generation. Describe something, get an audio track. Free accounts generate, and so do people without an account.

Every export. Chart formats, stem downloads, MIDI. We don't have a paid file format — there's no "export is Pro" step waiting at the end after you've done the work.

And the part that genuinely is unusual: you can do most of this without an account at all. Upload a track, get the chords, the key, the tempo and the stems, download them, close the tab. No email, no card, no confirmation link.

Where we do charge, stated plainly

If the previous section were the whole story, this post would be marketing rather than information. Three things cost money, and they're worth knowing before you run into them.

Volume. A free account gets a monthly allowance. It's sized for learning songs, working on your own material, and using the tools the way one musician uses them. It is not sized for processing a catalogue. If you're separating stems all day, you'll finish it.

Size and length. File size and track length ceilings are lower on free than on paid plans, and lower again if you haven't signed up. The ceiling applies at upload, so you'll be told before you spend a run rather than handed a truncated result afterwards. Long DJ sets and full rehearsal recordings need a paid plan.

A few advanced variants. Guitar and piano as their own separate stems — the six-way split rather than the four-way one — are a paid feature. So are some of the generator's modes and its highest quality setting. These are variants inside tools you already have, not tools you don't; but if guitar-and-piano stems are specifically what you came for, the free account won't produce them and you should know that now rather than after uploading.

And without an account, there's no library. Your result lives at its own link for a day and then it's gone. That's the real reason to sign up, and it's free to do.

So which limit would you rather have?

That's the actual question, and reasonable people answer it differently.

If you need one specific advanced capability and you need it often, a suite that gates capability may still be the better deal — you'll pay, but you'll pay for the one thing you use, inside a product built around it.

If you want to find out what a tool does before deciding anything, an access-gated free tier can't tell you, because the parts under the locks are exactly the parts you're evaluating. Ours can. You'll hit a volume wall eventually if you keep going, and by then you'll know precisely what you'd be buying.

There's a smaller reason too, and it's the one we actually argued about internally. A tier system where the good model is paid means the free result is worse than the tool can do — and the person who tried it walks away believing that's how well chord detection works. We'd rather be judged on the real output.

Checking any free tier in four questions

Useful beyond us, and it takes about two minutes on any tool's pricing page:

1. Can you run anything without an account? If not, the free tier costs you an email address and whatever comes with it.
2. Does the allowance reset monthly or daily? Monthly counts are much easier to strand.
3. What happens to a long track — rejected, or quietly shortened? Being told up front is worth more than it sounds.
4. Is the best version of the feature included, or is the free one a reduced model? This is the one that's hardest to see from the pricing table and matters most to the result.

Run those four questions across whatever you're comparing and the word "free" stops being a single thing.

Try it on something you know

The fastest way to settle any of this is a song you already know the chords to, because you'll spot a wrong answer immediately. Upload a track — no account needed — and look at the chart, the key, the tempo and the stems together. If it's right, you've found your tool and you know what its limits are. If it's wrong on your music, you've learned that in one minute without giving anyone an email address.

For more on the pieces individually: how the split works and why it helps, in splitting a song into stems; and how to read what comes back, in figuring out the chords of a song.