Free AI API credits and tiers
Signup credits and standing free tiers for LLM and AI APIs — what you get, the conditions, and whether a card is needed.
32 programs19 without a cardchecked: 2026-10-01
| # | Program ↕ | What you get | Requirements | Card ↕ | Validity | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Free Gemini 3.x Flash/Flash-Lite and 2.5 Pro/Flash/Flash-Lite with rate limits | Google account and an AI Studio API key; free-tier content may be used to improve Google products | No card | Ongoing | Open | |
| 2 |  OpenRouter :free models OpenRouter |
50 requests/day, or 1,000/day after a one-time $10 top-up; 20 requests/min | OpenRouter account; applies to :free model variants | No card | Ongoing | Open |
| 3 |  Groq free plan Groq |
Free rate-limited access (e.g. gpt-oss-120b: 30 RPM, 1K requests/day, 200K tokens/day) | GroqCloud account | — | Ongoing | Open |
| 4 |  Mistral Free plan API credits Mistral AI |
$10/month in API credits | Mistral account on the Free plan | No card | Monthly | Open |
| 5 |  Cerebras free trial Cerebras |
$5 in credits; free-trial tier with 1M tokens/day (5 RPM) | A verified payment method is required to activate the API | Card required | Not stated | Open |
| 6 |  Cloudflare Workers AI free allocation Cloudflare |
10,000 Neurons per day | Workers Free or Paid plan | — | Daily, ongoing | Open |
| 7 |  Cohere trial API key Cohere |
1,000 API calls per month (Chat: 20 requests/min) | Cohere account; evaluation use only | No card | Monthly, ongoing | Open |
| 8 |  Hugging Face Inference Providers credits Hugging Face |
$0.10/month for free users; $2.00/month with PRO | Hugging Face account; requests routed through Hugging Face | — | Monthly | Open |
| 9 |  Z.ai free Flash models Z.ai (Zhipu) |
GLM-4.7-Flash, GLM-4.5-Flash and GLM-4.6V-Flash free for input and output | Z.ai API account | — | Ongoing | Open |
| 10 |  Alibaba Cloud Model Studio new-user quota Alibaba Cloud |
About 1M tokens per model, counted separately for each model | Singapore region (international); complete account info; real-time inference only | — | 90 days from activation | Open |
| 11 | First 1,000,000 tokens free, plus 60 minutes of Whisper transcription | Scaleway account | — | One-time | Open | |
| 12 |  AI21 Studio free trial AI21 Labs |
$10 in credits | New account | No card | 7 days | Open |
| 13 | Fireworks AI signup credits Fireworks AI |
$1 in free credits | New account | — | Not stated | Open |
| 14 | $30/month in free compute | Starter plan ($0 base fee) | Card required | Monthly | Open | |
| 15 |  Google Cloud free trial Google Cloud |
$300 welcome credit | New customers who have never paid for Google Cloud, Maps or Firebase | Card required | 90 days | Open |
| 16 | AWS Free Tier credits Amazon Web Services |
Up to $200 ($100 at signup plus up to $100 for exploring services) | New AWS account on the free plan; Amazon Bedrock is available | — | 6 months or until the credits are used | Open |
| 17 | Azure free account Microsoft Azure |
$200 credit | Phone number, a non-prepaid card and a Microsoft or GitHub account | Card required | 30 days | Open |
| 18 | Voyage AI free embedding tokens Voyage AI (MongoDB) |
First 200M tokens on voyage-4, voyage-code-3 and rerank models (50M on older models) | Per account; not applicable to the Batch API | — | One-time | Open |
| 19 | Deepgram signup credit Deepgram |
$200 credit for speech-to-text and TTS | New pay-as-you-go account | No card | Not stated | Open |
| 20 | AssemblyAI signup credits AssemblyAI |
$50 in credits | New account; the free tier is limited to 5 new streams per minute | No card | Not stated | Open |
| 21 |  Gemini CLI free tier Google |
1,000 model requests per day with Google login (250/day, Flash only, with an unpaid API key) | Personal Google account (Gemini Code Assist for individuals) | No card | Daily, ongoing | Open |
| 22 | Google Agent Platform (Vertex AI) express mode Google Cloud |
Free tier within quotas without billing information | New Google Cloud user with a @gmail.com account | No card | Up to 90 days | Open |
| 23 | Jules free plan Google |
15 tasks per rolling 24 hours, 3 concurrent, Gemini 2.5 Pro | Google account | No card | Ongoing | Open |
| 24 | Free access to hosted NIM API endpoints for prototyping | Free NVIDIA Developer Program membership; prototyping use | No card | Ongoing | Open | |
| 25 |  GitHub Copilot Free GitHub |
Limited chat and agent usage; supports Copilot CLI and agent mode | GitHub account | No card | Ongoing | Open |
| 26 | Cursor Hobby plan Cursor |
Free: limited Agent requests and access to Composer | Cursor account; no credit card required | No card | Ongoing | Open |
| 27 | Kiro Free tier Kiro (AWS) |
50 credits per month: Claude Sonnet 4.5 and open-weight models (Qwen3 Coder Next, DeepSeek 3.2, MiniMax M2.1) | Social login or AWS Builder ID; rate limits apply | No card | Monthly, ongoing | Open |
| 28 | Amazon Q Developer Free Tier Amazon Web Services |
Limited agentic requests per month with the latest Claude models in the IDE or CLI | AWS Builder ID | No card | Monthly, ongoing | Open |
| 29 | Kilo Code free models Kilo Code |
Auto Free routing to free models via Kilo Gateway, no hosted credit required | Kilo account; free models where available | No card | Ongoing | Open |
| 30 | $10 in search API credits every month plus a $10 onboarding bonus | Exa account; no payment method required | No card | Monthly, ongoing | Open | |
| 31 | 1,000 API credits per month for AI web search | Tavily account; no credit card required | No card | Resets on the 1st of each month | Open | |
| 32 | Firecrawl Free plan Firecrawl |
1,000 credits per month (about 500 searches or 1,000 scraped pages) | Firecrawl account; no card; low rate limits, 2 concurrent requests | No card | Monthly, ongoing | Open |
Nothing found.
Other lists
Program terms change. Check the current requirements on the provider's site before applying.
FAQ
Which AI APIs are free permanently, not just on a trial?
Google AI Studio (Gemini API), OpenRouter (:free models), Groq, Cloudflare Workers AI, and Mistral offer ongoing free access with rate limits. One-time signup credits come from Fireworks, AI21, Deepgram, AssemblyAI, and the clouds.
How is a free tier different from signup credits?
A free tier resets daily or monthly but is rate-limited. Credits are granted once and expire — they are best spent on expensive models.