The Free AI Giveaway Wars Are Here and Nobody Knows What Anything Is Worth

Sora is now giving Pro users 100 videos a day. OpenAI prices that at $100 of daily value, which is a number they made up, but still — a hundred videos. Per day. For a hundred dollars a month.

Meanwhile Anthropic just handed every Max subscriber a thousand dollars in credits, apparently for existing. And Adobe, not to be left out, is offering a free month of unlimited Firefly image generation plus Firefly video, which until recently was a thing you paid for by the credit.

These are not the same product. Sora makes video. Claude writes code and argues with you about ethics. Firefly generates stock-photo-adjacent images with IP indemnification. Apples to oranges, sure — but they're all apples in the sense that they're all trying to answer the same question, which is: where are you going to do your AI stuff?

That's the only question that matters right now. Not which model is best, not which pipeline is most efficient — just: where does the habit live? What tab do you have open? The company that gets you to do your AI things there has won something, even if nobody can quite articulate what.

The math on these giveaways is interesting in the way that casino math is interesting. A hundred videos a day sounds like a lot until you realize almost nobody makes a hundred videos a day, so the marginal cost of the offer is near zero while the perceived value is enormous. Same with the Claude credits — a thousand dollars sounds like money until you try to spend it, at which point you discover that using Claude heavily for a month costs maybe thirty bucks. The credits are a gesture. A very large, very deliberate gesture.

Adobe's play is slightly different because Adobe is genuinely scared. The creative software monopoly they've held for thirty years is being eaten from below by tools that are free or close to it, and "unlimited Firefly for a month" is them saying please, please do your image generation here, inside the Creative Cloud, where we can see you. Keep the workflow in the suite. Don't go somewhere else and not come back.

All three companies are doing the same thing — buying attention with resources that cost them less than the number on the label implies — but only Adobe is doing it from a position of fear. OpenAI and Anthropic are doing it from something closer to exuberance, or maybe just the particular recklessness of companies that raised too much money and now need to show usage metrics.

Nobody knows what any of this stuff is worth. That's the honest read. The pricing is vibes. The giveaways are vibes. We're in the part of the cycle where everyone is throwing weight around to establish the habit loop before the market figures out what to actually charge for things.

Enjoy the free videos while they last.