[Aurornis]

This article comes from a niche of people who read a lot of news articles about LLMs (links scattered throughout) but have also avoided learning about the tools directly.

Like you said, the models available on free trials are usually toys compared to what developers use. Even Opus and GPT-5.5 are available on $20/month plans and you can buy a single month to try it out. The way they write about paying for a tool seeming "absurd and horrific" says it all about the level of actual research that went into their understanding. It's entirely based on news headlines.

[bigstrat2003]

So the free trial, designed to convince you that it's worth paying, doesn't well? That isn't the users' fault, that is the companies' fault. If a free trial sucks it's perfectly rational to not pay just in case the paid version doesn't suck.

[wvenable]

Not free trials, free versions.

Certainly if the user gets a bad impression from the free version that's on the provider but if you're writing about it then you shouldn't get to be that ignorant.