The current "free tools" search experience is simple:

People go on Google and search for: "mortgage calculator"

(I'm talking about the "normies", not those early adopters of LLMs)

They land on website X and calculate their mortgage based on some inputs.

I expect this to change.

How?

There's going to be a battle among:

Search vs Build vs Personalise

1️⃣ Search: pretty much every website will have a calculator or some sort of free tool (like every website has a social media account). It's just too easy and fast to make one today. I can spin up a mortgage calculator in less than a minute with any LLM. 

2️⃣ Build: some people won't search for them on Google, but they will decide to build their own (with LLMs / agents)

3️⃣ Personalise: some websites will have a calculator + the ability to make changes to it using a chat interface. 

Now the question is:

What we consider a free tool today (like a mortgage calculator) is going to be the same of what we will consider a free tool in 3-5 years?

I suspect not.

Tons of SaaS that are making 6 figures ARR today will be considered "free tools" in a few years.