Free tiers that allow commercial/production use (commercial_ok: true). Eval-only tiers (Cohere trial keys, NVIDIA NIM) are deliberately excluded — read their rows in the main list for the restriction.
25 of 68 tracked providers match.
| Provider | Type | What's free | The catch | Verified |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Google Gemini API (AI Studio) no cardno phonecommercial OKOpenAI-compat | 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 | 2026-10-08 |
| Groq no cardphonecommercial OKOpenAI-compat | Ongoing | Open-weight models (GPT-OSS, Qwen) plus Whisper, no credit card required | Limits apply at the organization level, not per API key. Phone verification required at signup | 2026-10-08 |
| OpenRouter no cardno phonecommercial OKOpenAI-compat | Ongoing | A rotating set of models with a :free suffix (16 on 2026-10-08; 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 | 2026-10-08 |
| Cloudflare Workers AI no cardno phonecommercial OKOpenAI-compat | 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 | 2026-10-08 |
| Cerebras cardcommercial OKOpenAI-compat | 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 | 2026-10-08 |
| Z.ai (Zhipu AI / GLM) no cardno phonecommercial OKOpenAI-compat | 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 Z.ai to "develop, train, or enhance any algorithms, models, or technologies that directly or indirectly compete with us" — otherwise general use, including commercial, isn't restricted | 2026-10-08 |
| Nebius AI Studio cardno phonecommercial OKOpenAI-compat | Trial | $1 trial credit, valid for 30 days | Product renamed to "Nebius Token Factory"; a bank card is required to set up billing | 2026-10-08 |
| NLP Cloud cardno phonecommercial OK | Trial | $15 trial credit | Corrected: the official registration page does not ask for a phone number, contradicting the earlier listing | 2026-10-08 |
| SambaNova Cloud commercial OKOpenAI-compat | Ongoing | Rate-limited free tier (applies when no payment method is linked) across the models listed in the Free Tier table | 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). card_required is unconfirmed because SambaNova's own pages disagree (read 2026-10-08): the rate-limits doc (https://docs.sambanova.ai/docs/en/models/rate-limits) says "Free Tier: Applied when there is no payment method linked with your account", while the plans page (https://cloud.sambanova.ai/plans) says "Add a payment method and purchase credits to run your first requests". Settling it needs a real signup, which is not done without the Owner's OK. The rate-limits doc (read 2026-10-09) also lists two preview models on the Free Tier at the same 20 RPM / 20 RPD / 200,000 TPD (DeepSeek-V3.2, gemma-4-31B-it), described there as having limited capacity and removable at short notice; they are not in models_free. | 2026-10-09 |
| Jina AI no cardno phonecommercial OKOpenAI-compat | 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. | 2026-10-08 |
| Deepgram no cardno phonecommercial OK | 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. | 2026-10-08 |
| AssemblyAI no cardno phonecommercial OKOpenAI-compat | 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. | 2026-10-08 |
| Mixedbread no cardno phonecommercial OK | 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. | 2026-10-08 |
| Ollama Cloud no phonecommercial OKOpenAI-compat | Ongoing | $0 Free plan: starter amount of cloud usage credits, limited to a smaller set of starter models; buying credits unlocks all cloud models | First-party — Ollama hosts the cloud models. Requires an ollama.com account + API key. The old 5-hour session / weekly limits are gone: usage is now credit-based with a monthly reset; Pro ($20/mo) includes $60 of credits. Prompts/responses are not logged or trained on. Whether a card is required is not stated on the current pricing page. | 2026-10-08 |
| Runware no cardno phonecommercial OK | Trial | $2 in free credits for new users who sign up with a business email, usable on the Models API (image, video, audio, LLM and 3D models) on the Sonic Inference Engine | The $2 requires signup with a business email; no credit card required. Commercial use of Outputs is allowed, subject to each model's licence (Partner Models are cleared for commercial use by Runware). Third-party provider models are subject to those providers' own rate limits. | 2026-10-08 |
| OCR.space no cardno phonecommercial OK | Ongoing | 25,000 conversions/month (Engine 1 & 2) plus 1,000 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. | 2026-10-08 |
| LlamaParse (LlamaCloud) no cardno phonecommercial OK | Ongoing | Free plan: 10,000 credits/month (up to ~10,000 pages at the cheapest parse tier, as low as 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). | 2026-10-08 |
| Nanonets no cardno phonecommercial OK | 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. | 2026-10-08 |
| Speechify API no cardno phonecommercial OK | Ongoing | 500K characters/month TTS (hard cap; pauses until next month), catalog voices, streaming and SSML | Commercial use is allowed on the free tier. No credit card required. Free cannot top up and pauses when the monthly balance runs out. Voice cloning is paid-plan only; voice agents are now an enterprise-only product (no free minutes). | 2026-10-08 |
| Unreal Speech no cardcommercial OK | 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. | 2026-10-08 |
| Sarvam AI commercial OKOpenAI-compat | Trial | ₹100 in free credits on signup, usable across any API including chat completion (Sarvam-105B) and speech (STT/TTS); credits never expire | One-time signup credit shared across all APIs; credits never expire. Sarvam-M has been deprecated (use Sarvam-105B). Signup credits carry commercial production rights for generated Output. Card/phone requirement not stated in the docs. The docs list limits per plan but do not say explicitly that free-credit accounts are on Starter. India-focused provider (pricing in INR), strong Indic-language models. | 2026-10-08 |
| Upstage no cardcommercial OKOpenAI-compat | Trial | $10 free credit on sign-up (per Upstage's Getting Started docs) for the API — Solar LLM (chat + embeddings) plus Document Parse / OCR / information extraction; Studio document agents include 10 free runs each | The Solar Pro 4 free window (2026-08-05 to 2026-08-11) has ended; standard pricing is $0.30 input / $1.20 output per 1M tokens from 2026-10-11 (UTC), after a 70%-off phase that runs until 2026-10-10. Beyond the signup credit, API use is pay-per-use, with prepaid commitment tiers from $100/mo adding bonus credit and higher limits. Studio agent runs need no card. A separate institutional grant (up to 1 year of free Solar Pro + Document Parse) exists for eligible schools, hospitals and nonprofits only. Solar Pro 2/3 and Solar Mini are deprecated on 2026-10-30 (KST). | 2026-10-08 |
| Veryfi no cardcommercial OK | 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. | 2026-10-08 |
| W&B Inference no cardcommercial OKOpenAI-compat | Trial | Serverless Inference credits on the Free plan "for a limited time" (amount not published); Free accounts have a default spending cap of $100/month | W&B Inference is now documented as CoreWeave Forge Serverless Inference (docs.wandb.ai redirects to docs.coreweave.com). The $100/month figure is a default spending cap, not a stated free-credit amount. When credits run out, Free accounts must activate pay-as-you-go on the Billing tab or upgrade; CoreWeave requires prepayment for paid access. Available only from supported geographic locations. OpenAI-compatible endpoint at api.inference.wandb.ai/v1; API keys are created at forge.coreweave.com. The pricing page lists "$5/mo free credit for a limited time" only under Pro and "Billed monthly" under Free, so the Free amount is unclear. | 2026-10-08 |
| Typhoon (SCB 10X) no cardno phonecommercial OKOpenAI-compat | 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. | 2026-10-08 |
FAQ
Which free LLM APIs allow commercial use?
Every provider on this page permits commercial/production use on its free tier (`commercial_ok: true`), confirmed against its own terms. Evaluation-only tiers are excluded.
Is a free tier safe to ship to production?
Check the rate limits and whether the free tier is renewing or a one-time credit — both are on each provider’s row. For steady load, a renewing free tier or a paid plan is safer than a trial credit.