My Actual AI Stack for Building Apps in 2026 — All Free

Source: Dev.to

Introduction

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I’ve shipped 7 Mac apps in the past year, and every AI feature in them runs on free tools. Below is the exact stack I use, why I chose each component, and where the limits lie.

Gemini 2.5 Flash Preview via REST API

Cost: Free tier — 500 requests/day, no credit card required

Use for: Log diagnosis, document analysis, text classification, or any task that needs strong reasoning.

The free tier is genuinely sufficient for developer tools with intermittent AI use; I’ve never hit the daily limit in normal usage.

Get a key: (takes ~2 minutes).

Running Open‑Source LLMs Locally

Cost: Free, open source

Use for: Privacy‑sensitive processing, offline use, high‑volume tasks.

Install

brew install ollama

Pull a model

ollama pull gemma2

Run

ollama run gemma2

Models I actually use