| API | Type | What's free | The catch | Verified |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Typhoon (SCB 10X) Thai-language LLMs, OCR and speech via an OpenAI-compatible research API | Ongoing | Free to use research showcase API — all Typhoon models at $0 | By SCB 10X, the venture arm of Siam Commercial Bank, focused on Thai-language models. The free catalog spans LLMs (typhoon-v2.5-30b-a3b-instruct), OCR (typhoon-ocr family) and realtime Thai ASR (typhoon-asr-realtime, typhoon-isan-asr-realtime) — the hosted API is OpenAI-compatible, including audio transcriptions. Beta, provided as-is with no formal support; usage data is collected to improve the model; SCB claims no rights in outputs. Sign up for a free API key at opentyphoon.ai. | 2026-08-14 |
| Z.ai (Zhipu AI / GLM) A permanently-free model with no trial clock | Ongoing | GLM-4.5-Flash, GLM-4.7-Flash (text), and GLM-4.6V-Flash (vision) are officially listed as $0 cost (input, cached input, and output) on a permanent basis | Terms of Use prohibit using the service to "develop, train, or improve" competing algorithms or models — otherwise general use, including commercial, isn't restricted | 2026-08-13 |
| Cloudflare Workers AI Highest free daily volume for a real side project | Ongoing | 10,000 Neurons/day, all account plans | Resets daily at 00:00 UTC; overage on a Workers Paid plan bills at $0.011/1,000 Neurons. A few models (e.g. Kimi K2.6/K2.7-code, GLM-5.2) now require a Workers Paid plan | 2026-08-02 |
| Google Gemini API (AI Studio) The only frontier-class model with a genuine free tier | Ongoing | Gemini 2.5 Flash, 2.5 Flash-Lite, 2.5 Pro (limited), embeddings, TTS models | Free-tier prompts/outputs may be used by Google to improve its products outside the UK/CH/EEA/EU. Since the 2026-03-23 terms, only Paid Services may serve API clients to end users in the EEA/CH/UK | 2026-08-02 |
| Ollama Cloud Cloud-hosted open models with the Ollama workflow, no card | Ongoing | $0 Free plan: access to cloud-hosted open models (Qwen, GPT-OSS, DeepSeek, etc.) via API | First-party — Ollama hosts the cloud models. Requires an ollama.com account + API key (`ollama signin`); the free plan is for light usage, Pro ($20/mo) raises limits. No card required. | 2026-08-14 |
| OpenRouter Widest model selection behind one no-card key | Ongoing | A rotating set of models with a :free suffix (~14 today; count fluctuates), single API across many providers | ToS (Jul 2026) prohibits reselling API access or building a competing service — platform-wide, not just the free models; per-model terms still apply | 2026-08-02 |
| LlamaParse (LlamaCloud) Free document parsing for RAG (~10k pages/mo) | Ongoing | Free plan: 10,000 credits/month (~10,000 pages in balanced parse mode at 1 credit/page) | Credit-based (1,000 credits = $1.25); premium parse modes consume more credits per page. No card required. Document parsing for RAG (LlamaIndex). | 2026-08-14 |
| OCR.space Classic free OCR (25k conversions/mo, no card) | Ongoing | 25,000 conversions/month (Engine 1 & 2) plus 2,500 Engine 3 conversions/month; max 1 MB file, PDFs up to 3 pages | Free searchable-PDF output carries a watermark (raw text extraction is unrestricted); the free key needs only an email, no card. Commercial use permitted. | 2026-08-14 |
| Speechify API Free commercial TTS (50k chars/mo) | Ongoing | 50,000 characters/month TTS (hard cap) + 60 min/month voice agents | Commercial use is allowed on the free tier. No credit card required. Hard monthly cap that pauses at the limit. | 2026-08-14 |
| AssemblyAI Free speech-to-text plus an OpenAI-compatible LLM gateway | Trial | $50 free credit on signup (no card) — pre-recorded & streaming speech-to-text, Speech Understanding, and an OpenAI-compatible LLM Gateway (25+ models) | One-time credit, not renewing. Catch: the default model differs between free and paid accounts — set speech_models explicitly to avoid cost jumps on upgrade. Only the LLM Gateway is OpenAI-compatible. | 2026-08-14 |
| Jina AI Free embeddings & rerank behind an OpenAI-compatible endpoint | Trial | 10M free tokens (one-time) across all models — embeddings, rerankers, classifier; plus a keyless Reader (r.jina.ai) for basic use | The 10M-token balance is a one-time grant that does not replenish; the keyless Reader is genuinely ongoing. Hosted API is commercial-OK and data is not used for training. No card required. | 2026-08-14 |
| AI Horde Anonymous, no-signup free generation (variable speed) | Ongoing | Free crowdsourced text & image generation; anonymous API key '0000000000' (no registration), or register to earn kudos for priority | Community-powered volunteer network — model availability and speed vary with worker supply, so it is not a fixed-SLA service. No card, no phone. Kudos never expire and cannot be sold. | 2026-08-14 |
| Pollinations.ai No-signup free image generation (Flux/SD) | Ongoing | Free hosted image models (Flux, Turbo, Stable Diffusion) via a simple GET URL; also text and audio. No signup required to start | Anonymous free images may carry a watermark (since 2025); free registration removes it via the nologo parameter. No card, no phone. Commercial use is not explicitly guaranteed in the docs. | 2026-08-14 |
| SambaNova Cloud Fast open models on a rate-limited free tier | Ongoing | Rate-limited free tier (applies when no payment method is linked) across all models | Free Tier applies when no payment method is linked to the account; SambaCloud ToS grants a commercial license (no evaluation-only clause). The previously-listed "$5 / 3 months" trial could not be re-confirmed on official pages (2026-07-30). | 2026-08-13 |
| W&B Inference Open-weight frontier models (DeepSeek, Llama, Qwen, GLM, GPT-OSS) behind one unified API with Weave tracing | Ongoing | $100/month of Serverless Inference credits on the Free plan (default spending cap; offer for a limited time) | Serverless Inference credits come with Free, Pro and Academic plans for a limited time; when credits run out, Free accounts must activate pay-as-you-go on the Billing tab or upgrade. OpenAI-compatible endpoint at api.inference.wandb.ai/v1 with any W&B API key. | 2026-08-14 |
| Deepgram Biggest free credit here, for speech (STT/TTS) | Trial | $200 free credit on signup (no card, no expiration) — Nova speech-to-text and Aura text-to-speech at pay-as-you-go rates | No card and no expiration on the credit. Data catch: the Model Improvement Program is opt-OUT — send mip_opt_out=true per request to keep your data out of training. Native REST/WebSocket API, not OpenAI-compatible. | 2026-08-14 |
| Mixedbread No-card embeddings & rerank credit | Trial | Starter plan: $5 one-time credit (no card) — embeddings (mxbai-embed-large-v1), reranking, and multimodal search over PDF/image/doc/code | Free credit is usage-based and non-renewing; usage-based pricing applies afterward. Native REST API, not documented as OpenAI-compatible. No card required. | 2026-08-14 |
| Nanonets Document extraction on a $50 no-card credit | Trial | $50 in free credits on signup (one-time) across data-extraction / OCR workflows | One-time signup credit, not renewing (credits never expire); no credit card required to start. Paid plans start at $100/month afterwards. | 2026-08-14 |
| Runware Fast image models with a $2 no-card credit | Trial | $2 in signup credits across first-party image models (FLUX.1/FLUX.2, Stable Diffusion 3, SDXL) on the Sonic Inference Engine — hundreds to thousands of generations | The $2 requires signup with a business email (personal/free-mail domains may be rejected); one-time, non-renewing. No watermark, no card, commercial use allowed. The OpenAI-compatible endpoint is chat-only, not for images. | 2026-08-14 |
| Hume AI (Octave TTS) Expressive TTS with a commercial free tier | Ongoing | 10,000 characters/month TTS (~10 minutes) on the Free plan | The free plan includes a commercial license; overage billed at $0.15/1,000 chars. No card stated as required to start. Not OpenAI-compatible. | 2026-08-14 |
| Unreal Speech Largest free TTS (250k chars/mo, attribution) | Ongoing | 250,000 characters/month TTS (~6 hours of audio) | Commercial use allowed, but free-plan users must attribute Unreal Speech with a link when publishing audio. First-party REST endpoints. No credit card required. | 2026-08-14 |
| Veryfi NEW Free-forever document OCR (100 docs/mo, no card) | Ongoing | Free Forever plan: up to 100 documents/month — OCR plus structured data extraction (receipts, invoices, and 100+ document types) | No credit card required. The 'Free Forever' 100 docs/mo tier is the standing free tier (a separate 14-day trial unlocks paid features). Proprietary OCR / document-intelligence REST API. | 2026-08-14 |
| Upstage NEW Solar LLM + document OCR behind one OpenAI-compatible key | Trial | Solar Pro 4 is free for a limited time (promo); otherwise the API is paid prepaid (commitment tiers from $100/mo) — Solar LLM (chat + embeddings) plus Document Parse / OCR / information extraction; Studio agents include 10 free runs | The former $10 signup credit no longer appears on the pricing page (now prepaid commitment tiers from $100/mo). No card needed for the limited-time free model or the 10 free Studio runs; a separate institutional grant (up to 1 year of free Solar + Document Parse) exists for eligible organizations only. | 2026-08-14 |
| Cohere Free embeddings and rerank for RAG prototypes | Ongoing | Trial (evaluation) API keys covering chat, embed and rerank | Explicitly for evaluation only — Cohere's terms prohibit production/commercial use on a trial key | 2026-08-13 |
| Groq Lowest-latency inference for open-weight models | Ongoing | Open-weight models (Llama, Qwen, GPT-OSS) plus Whisper, no credit card required | Limits apply at the organization level, not per API key. Phone verification required at signup | 2026-08-02 |
| HuggingFace Router access to many open-weight providers under one key | Ongoing | Free CPU Basic + ZeroGPU for Spaces; Inference Providers has a monthly credit ($0.10/mo on Free plan, $2.00/mo on PRO/Team/Enterprise) | Credits only apply with "Routed by Hugging Face" billing, not with a Custom Provider Key | 2026-08-13 |
| Moondream Cloud Tiny vision model, OpenAI-compatible, monthly free credit | Ongoing | $5/month usage credits in every workspace (Free plan) for the Moondream vision model — caption, query (VQA), detect, point | Recurring $5/month credit, no credit card required (stated on the pricing page/blog). Commercial terms not specified. OpenAI-compatible endpoint. | 2026-08-14 |
| SiliconFlow Permanently-free open models, no trial clock | Ongoing | Several models permanently free (e.g. Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct and others) at $0 cost, plus a $1 welcome credit for paid models | Signup requires SMS phone verification. Full "real-name authentication" (needed for recharging/billing) requires a mainland China, Hong Kong/Macao, or Taiwan ID document — this may limit full access for users without one, though basic use of free models appears reachable with standard account verification | 2026-08-13 |
| ElevenLabs Best-known TTS voices (free tier is non-commercial) | Ongoing | 10,000 credits/month shared across Text-to-Speech, Speech-to-Text and more (~10 min TTS/month) | The free tier is NON-COMMERCIAL only per the Terms of Use (a commercial license begins on paid Starter, $6/mo), and historically required attribution. API access is available on the free plan. No credit card to sign up. | 2026-08-14 |
| Nutrient (Data Extraction API) NEW Document data extraction with a genuinely renewing free monthly quota | Ongoing | 5,000 credits/month (renews; no rollover) — ~5,000 text-parse pages, fewer for OCR-heavy 'Understand'/'Agentic' parsing (9-18 credits/page) | No credit card required. Formerly PSPDFKit. Extraction/OCR with tables, key-value and handwriting. Commercial terms not stated on the pricing page. | 2026-08-14 |
| Photoroom NEW Programmatic background removal and AI image editing to prototype free | Ongoing | 10 free production calls on the Remove Background API (one-time) plus 1,000 sandbox calls/month on the Image Editing API (watermarked) | No credit card required. Sandbox output is watermarked (for testing); the 10 production calls return clean output. Image editing/generation (AI backgrounds, relighting, shadows). | 2026-08-14 |
| Pinecone Inference Free embeddings + rerank for RAG (5M tokens/mo) | Ongoing | Starter (free) plan: 5M tokens/mo for embedding models (llama-text-embed-v2, multilingual-e5-large) and 500 requests/mo for the bge-reranker-v2-m3 rerank model | Free rerank limited to bge-reranker-v2-m3; overages are pay-as-you-go. Not OpenAI-compatible. No card required. | 2026-08-14 |
| Twelve Labs (Marengo Embed) Free multimodal (video/audio/image/text) embeddings | Ongoing | Free plan: the Marengo Embed API for all input types (video, audio, image, text) at no cost, plus ~600 min indexing | No credit card for the Free plan, but indexed data expires after 90 days unless upgraded. Marengo produces multimodal embeddings. Not OpenAI-compatible. | 2026-08-14 |
| Unstructured NEW Turning messy documents into LLM-ready structured data, free every month | Ongoing | 15,000 pages/month, resets monthly — document parsing/OCR across 50+ file types (layout, tables, generative OCR enrichment) | No credit card required. Purpose-built to turn documents into clean, structured input for RAG/LLM pipelines. Commercial terms not stated on the pricing page. | 2026-08-14 |
| Vercel AI Gateway One key across many providers with a free monthly credit | Trial | Free tier: $5/month credit covering a subset of models (Free Tier eligible models) at lower rate limits | The monthly $5 credit is stated in Vercel's own docs. Once you purchase credits, your account moves to the paid tier and the monthly free credit no longer applies. BYOK is not available on the free tier. | 2026-08-14 |
| AI21 Labs Jamba long-context models on a $10 trial | Trial | $10 trial credit, valid 3 months | Card not required for the trial credit itself, required once it expires | 2026-08-03 |
| Alibaba Cloud (Model Studio) Qwen models with a large free token quota (Singapore region) | Trial | 1,000,000 tokens (example figure, varies by model), international/Singapore region only | Excludes batch processing, context caching, fine-tuning, and dedicated deployment | 2026-08-13 |
| Fireworks AI Fast hosted open models to trial with $1 | Trial | $1 trial credit | Fireworks uses prepaid credits. After the $1 credit is exhausted, add a payment method and credits (or enable auto top-up) to continue; account limits can rise with spend | 2026-08-03 |
| Poolside NEW Free coding-focused LLMs behind an OpenAI-compatible key | Trial | Laguna M.1 (225B) and Laguna XS.2 (33B, open-weights) are free for a limited time via a self-serve developer API key (also on OpenRouter) | Coding-focused models. Poolside describes the free access as 'free for a limited time' (not perpetual) and it may change at general availability. Self-serve key at platform.poolside.ai; OpenRouter is an alternative route. | 2026-08-14 |
| Sarvam AI Indic-language chat + speech via one OpenAI-compatible key | Trial | ₹100 in free credits on signup, usable across all APIs including the Sarvam-M chat/LLM API and speech (STT/TTS) | One-time signup credit shared across all APIs; card/phone requirement not stated on the docs. India-focused provider (pricing in INR), strong Indic-language models. | 2026-08-14 |
| Scaleway Generative APIs EU-hosted open models with 1M free tokens | Trial | 1,000,000 tokens free + 60 min Whisper transcription; billing starts at token 1,000,001 | European provider (France). Free allowance is a one-time token bucket, not time-limited. The 1M free tokens need no card; adding a card + passing KYC unlocks the official rate limits. | 2026-08-13 |
| Tencent Hunyuan Chinese-language LLM workloads via an OpenAI-compatible endpoint | Trial | 1,000,000 free tokens for Hunyuan text LLMs (hunyuan-a13b, turbos, translation & vision models), plus a separate 1,000,000-token allotment for hunyuan-embedding | Free resource package valid 1 year from activation; unused tokens expire. Tencent Cloud generally requires mainland-China real-name ID verification to activate — a practical barrier for non-China users. Hunyuan is gradually migrating to TokenHub (the legacy platform is no longer adding new models). Commercial-use terms not stated on the free-quota page. | 2026-08-14 |
| ModelScope (API-Inference) Free daily calls to many open models (real-name verification required) | Ongoing | ~2,000 free API calls/day across open-weight models (Qwen3, DeepSeek, GLM, Llama, etc.) via API-Inference | Alibaba's model hub — a different product from Alibaba Model Studio. Requires a ModelScope account bound to an Alibaba Cloud account with real-name (ID) verification — a practical barrier for non-China users. Explicitly non-commercial ("for developers to experience"). No card. | 2026-08-14 |
| Datalab (Marker / Surya) NEW Open-source-pedigree OCR (Marker/Surya) on a free monthly allowance | Trial | $20/month (work email) or $10/month (personal email) free usage allowance — OCR in 90+ languages, PDF-to-markdown, tables, forms and structured extraction | Landing page still advertises a $5 signup credit, but the billing page describes the current free tier as a recurring monthly allowance ($20/mo work email, $10/mo personal, no card, 10 req/min) “designed to let you run a complete proof of concept before committing to a paid plan” — no explicit statement on commercial use of the hosted API. The self-hosted OSS weights carry a separate restriction (research/personal/startups under $2M ARR/funding). | 2026-08-13 |
| Contextual AI NEW A strong instruction-following reranker to try for free | Trial | $25 in free credits on the on-demand plan, usable on the Rerank (rerank-v2) and Generate APIs | One-time signup credit (does not renew); the instruction-following reranker is the standout free capability. Commercial-use terms not stated on the pricing page. | 2026-08-14 |
| Gladia High-accuracy async + real-time transcription to trial | Trial | €50 in free credits on signup for speech-to-text (~80+ hrs pre-recorded or 60+ hrs real-time at current rates) | One-time grant with no monthly reset; prepaid model — top up once the credit is consumed. Card requirement not explicitly stated on the pricing page. | 2026-08-14 |
| Rev AI NEW 5 free hours of high-accuracy speech-to-text to evaluate | Trial | Free credits equivalent to 5 hours of Reverb ASR (speech-to-text), usable across all Rev AI products | One-time signup grant (does not renew). High-accuracy English ASR. No credit card required (stated on the signup page). Commercial terms not stated. | 2026-08-14 |
| Rime Low-latency conversational TTS to prototype | Trial | 3,000 free TTS minutes for every new account (Starter plan) | One-time allotment on signup; no credit card required (stated on the pricing page). The pricing table shows ~800 free minutes (~800k characters) while the page’s own FAQ and the docs still say 3,000 — an internal inconsistency. Commercial-use terms not stated. | 2026-08-14 |
| Smallest.ai (Waves) NEW Fast TTS + voice cloning on a $10 credit | Trial | $10 in free credits with full access — TTS, STT, speech-to-speech and voice cloning | $10 signup credit with full access. Fast TTS plus voice cloning. Card and commercial terms not stated on the pricing page. | 2026-08-14 |
| Speechmatics High-accuracy STT + TTS on a $100 no-card credit | Trial | $100 one-time usage credit (no card) covering Speech-to-Text and Text-to-Speech | One-time $100 credit, no card required — replaced the previous 3,000 min/month + 1M chars recurring allowance on 2026-07-31. Add a card when you move to Pro. Commercial-use permission not explicitly stated. | 2026-08-14 |
| Voicegain NEW Largest no-card speech-to-text credit ($50) | Trial | $50 in free credits on signup (no credit card) — speech-to-text | No credit card required to start — an explicit $50 developer credit. Commercial terms not stated on the pricing page. Native STT REST API. | 2026-08-14 |
| Voyage AI NEW Best-in-class embeddings and reranking with a large free allotment | Trial | 200M free tokens on current embedding models (voyage-4-large, voyage-4, voyage-4-lite, voyage-context-4, voyage-code-4) and on rerankers (rerank-2.5 family); voyage-multimodal-3.5 and voyage-multimodal-3 get 200M text tokens + 150B pixels — a large one-time complimentary allotment per model | The allotment is a one-time complimentary balance per model, not a renewing monthly quota. No credit card required to claim. Owned by MongoDB — a first-party model provider, not a proxy. | 2026-08-14 |
| Arli AI A permanently-free (heavily rate-limited) test tier | Ongoing | Free plan ($0): access to all text LLMs (Gemma, Qwen, etc.), capped at ~5 requests per 2-day window, 12K context, 1 request at a time | Free tier is for testing only — very restrictive. Provider advertises zero-log / no data retention. Card requirement for the free tier is not stated on the pricing page. | 2026-08-14 |
| Cartesia NEW Low-latency streaming TTS + STT on a renewing monthly free quota | Ongoing | 20,000 credits/month (~27 min of Sonic TTS or ~1h51 of Ink speech-to-text) | Commercial use is NOT allowed on the free plan (the $5/mo Pro plan adds a commercial licence). Low-latency streaming voice over WebSocket/REST; own API (not OpenAI-shaped). | 2026-08-14 |
| Fish Audio NEW Free multilingual TTS with voice cloning for personal projects | Ongoing | 8,000 credits/month (~7 min of generation, up to 500 characters per generation); TTS, STT and voice cloning | Free plan is personal, non-commercial only (commercial use requires a Premium subscription). No credit card required to sign up. | 2026-08-14 |
| LMNT NEW Free real-time TTS with unlimited voice cloning | Ongoing | 15,000 characters/month of TTS, with unlimited voice clones | Commercial use is not included on the free tier (the paid Indie plan and above add a commercial licence). Real-time streaming speech API. | 2026-08-14 |
| Clarifai Multimodal (LLM + vision) models on a $5 credit | Trial | One-time $5 credit across serverless models (GPT-OSS-120B, Claude, Llama), vision, embeddings and image generation | Catch: SMS phone verification is required to claim the $5. Credit is one-time and expires 30 days after grant; a card is required to recharge afterward. Checked ToS (clarifai.com/company/terms, effective 2025-10-01) and billing docs (docs.clarifai.com/control/account-billing/) for commercial/production-use language. No clause restricts the $5 trial credit / Pay-As-You-Go tier to evaluation-only. The 'evaluation purposes only, not for production' language in §7.3 applies specifically to Beta Releases, not this plan. No explicit statement either way, so left null per contribution guidelines. | 2026-08-11 |
| Nebius AI Studio Cheap open-model inference after a $1 trial | Trial | $1 trial credit, valid for 30 days | Product renamed to "Nebius Token Factory"; a bank card is required to set up billing | 2026-08-13 |
| Novita AI $100 Sandbox credits for trying Model APIs, GPUs, and agent workflows | Trial | $100 Sandbox credits, valid for 90 days | Official signup advertises $100 Sandbox credits valid for 90 days; no credit card required. Novita Terms of Service state that the Site and Marketplace Offerings may not be exploited for any commercial purpose without express prior written permission. | 2026-08-10 |
| Camb.ai NEW Expressive multilingual TTS, STT and dubbing on one free quota | Ongoing | 2,000 credits/month covering ~25K characters of MARS TTS, 125 min of STT, plus limited watermarked dubbing and translation (incl. 5 OCR pages) | Uses its own MARS8 voice models (not OpenAI-compatible). Dubbing output on the free tier is watermarked. Card and commercial terms not stated on the pricing page. | 2026-08-14 |
| Mistral (La Plateforme) European models to prototype against before upgrading | Ongoing | "Restrictive" free tier explicitly for "try and explore" — official docs say to upgrade for "actual projects and production use" | Phone verification required to activate; no credit card required. Free tier is opt-in for data training. | 2026-08-13 |
| Baseten Free starter credits for evaluating hosted custom and open models | Trial | New accounts receive free credits; Baseten's current pricing page does not state the amount | Basic is $0/month, pay as you go. Current pricing confirms new-account credits but does not publish an amount or expiration date | 2026-08-03 |
| NLP Cloud NLP tasks (NER, classification, summarization) on a $15 trial | Trial | $15 trial credit | Corrected: the official registration page does not ask for a phone number, contradicting the earlier listing | 2026-08-13 |
| OVHcloud AI Endpoints EU-hosted, no-account access to open models | Ongoing | Two Qwen3Guard models (Gen-8B and Gen-0.6B) are currently listed as Free in the catalog; access is available anonymously or with an API key tied to a Public Cloud project | European provider (France), relevant for EU data-sovereignty/GDPR-conscious use. The authenticated tier needs a valid payment method on the project (though "Free" models themselves don't charge); anonymous access needs neither an account nor a card. A separate general $200 Public Cloud trial voucher also exists but is unrelated to this free-model tier | 2026-08-03 |
| Cerebras Fastest tokens/sec on wafer-scale hardware | Trial | $5 in free credits for new accounts, usable across all public models | A verified payment method is required to activate Playground/API access (no charge until you buy credits). Credits expire 30 days after grant; whether any free access persists past expiry is not stated | 2026-08-02 |
| NVIDIA NIM Trialling NVIDIA-optimized models (evaluation only) | Trial | Trial credit, phone verification required | "Evaluation only, not production" per NVIDIA's own Trial Terms of Service — NVIDIA may discontinue the trial at any time with no continuity obligation | 2026-08-13 |
| IBM watsonx.ai (Lite plan) Governed enterprise inference with a monthly free quota | Ongoing | Lite plan: 300,000 tokens/month for foundation model inference, 20 CUH/month for ML tooling, 100 pages/month of document text extraction | Lite plan doesn't support fine-tuning of foundation or custom models; 1-day idle deployment timeout. Never expires or bills while inside quota, but a payment method (with a nominal ~$1 authorization hold) is required at signup | 2026-08-13 |
| Modal Self-hosting open models on free monthly GPU credit | Trial | $30/month recurring credit (Starter plan) | Corrected from a previously listed "$5-30/month" range; this is a recurring monthly credit, not a one-time trial. Modal is serverless compute you deploy models on, not a hosted model API The full $30/month credit requires adding a payment method (without one the free credit is $5/month). | 2026-08-13 |
| Retell AI NEW Build a voice agent on a $10 credit | Trial | $10 in free credits plus 20 free concurrent calls — voice-agent orchestration (STT + LLM + TTS) | $10 signup credit with full platform access. A voice-agent builder (orchestration), not a raw model API. Retell’s Stripe case study describes capturing a card at signup for automatic billing once the free credits are used (a third-party review claims otherwise — treat card as required). | 2026-08-14 |