I am a student and cannot afford a clinical IQ assessment right now but I am genuinely curious about my cognitive profile. I know most free tests are junk but I also do not want to spend money I do not have on something I am just curious about. Is there a middle ground here or is free IQ testing so unreliable that it is better to just wait until you can afford something legitimate?
The middle ground exists but you have to know what to look for. Free tests that claim to give you a precise full scale IQ score in under 15 minutes are not worth your time regardless of how polished they look. What is worth your time are platforms that offer genuine psychometric tasks even in limited free versions. RIOT IQ is worth looking at here because even their accessible entry points are built on real CHC model foundations with actual norming behind them, which is a completely different category from the viral quiz sites. University cognitive research portals also sometimes offer free tasks measuring specific abilities like working memory and processing speed that give you real data on individual cognitive domains even without a full IQ estimate.
A free test that measures one or two abilities well is more valuable than a free test that claims to measure everything 
Narrow but valid beats broad but fake every time 