Free AI tokens are a trap, and teams that treat a free quota as genuinely free pay later in migration and rework. A free allowance only helps when paired with a hard kill switch that stops an experiment the moment it exceeds a budget you chose in advance. This article argues that position, then shows a small gated client that makes free model access and a free server actually safe to use. The concrete example is MonkeyCode's free tier, but the gate works against any OpenAI-compatible endpoint. ...