Monica's Free Tier Gives You 40 Queries a Day — Is an AI Aggregator Worth It? (2026)

Monica is a browser-extension AI assistant whose pitch is “one subscription, many vendors’ models.” Judging it requires two things: understanding how the free 40 queries are counted, and noticing that “unlimited” and “advanced credits” are two separate meters.

Read from the official pricing page on 2026-09-06.

Free (US$0)

• 40 basic-model accesses per day, where the basic models listed on the day are Claude 4.5 Haiku, Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite and GPT-5.4 mini — sharing one allowance.
• Image and video generation: limited trial.
• ChatPDF: limited trial. AI Agent: limited trial.
• Basic-model writing, translation and summarisation: included.
• Cross-platform assistant and app integrations: included.

Forty a day is not stingy for lookups, translations and page summaries. The real ceiling is that they all run on small models — long-form reasoning, coding and complex synthesis will feel thin. That, not the count, is the limit.

Paid tiers (page displayed annual pricing)

Advanced models listed on the day: GPT-5.5, Claude 4.6 Sonnet, Gemini 3.1 Pro. Image and video generation runs on Nano Banana 2, GPT Image 2, Sora 2 and Veo 3.

The part to read carefully: Max and Ultra both say unlimited advanced models, yet each also carries a credit figure (4,500 / 20,000). Structurally, “unlimited” covers conversational use while credits cover heavy features — image and video generation, Deep Research, Create Slides, Browser Operator. Credits are the real difference between those two tiers. The page does not publish per-feature credit costs, so we don’t estimate them.

Evidence note: the page showed annual pricing only; monthly list prices were not displayed, matching what we found in August.

When an aggregator makes sense — and when it doesn’t

It fits if you use AI incidentally all over the browser (translate a selection, summarise a page, rewrite an email); you want to compare vendors’ answers without three subscriptions; or you need image/video generation only occasionally.

Go direct to one vendor if your heavy work lives inside one flagship model and its exclusive features (coding agents, project workspaces, deep research); you need full official context windows and day-one features — an aggregator decides which models it exposes and how far; or you care about data flow, since another platform is another data processor whose terms you should read.

Thirty-second version

• Free: 40/day, small models only. Fine for odd jobs, thin for real work.
• Pro: buys volume (5,000 + 200) for daily but light use.
• Max: buys “unlimited” plus 4,500 credits — the sweet spot for most heavy users.
• Ultra: 20,000 credits; only worth it if you generate media or run agents at scale.

Official link: https://monica.im/pricing

On this site: Monica tool page

Figures read from the live pricing page on 2026-09-06 with a rendering browser. Prices and limits change; the vendor’s checkout page is authoritative.