Free tiers that reach beyond plain text — vision, image, audio/speech, embeddings or rerank on the free plan.
52 of 69 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 | 2026-08-02 |
| Groq no cardphonecommercial OKOpenAI-compat | 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 |
| OpenRouter no cardno phonecommercial OKOpenAI-compat | 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 |
| 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 | 2026-08-02 |
| Cohere no cardno phoneeval onlyOpenAI-compat | 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 |
| HuggingFace no cardOpenAI-compat | 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 |
| SiliconFlow no cardphoneOpenAI-compat | 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 |
| 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 the service to "develop, train, or improve" competing algorithms or models — otherwise general use, including commercial, isn't restricted | 2026-08-13 |
| Scaleway Generative APIs no cardOpenAI-compat | 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 |
| 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. | 2026-08-14 |
| 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. | 2026-08-14 |
| 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. | 2026-08-14 |
| 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. | 2026-08-14 |
| Clarifai no cardphoneOpenAI-compat | 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 |
| Ollama Cloud no cardno phonecommercial OKOpenAI-compat | 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 |
| AI Horde no cardno phone | 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 |
| ModelScope (API-Inference) no cardeval onlyOpenAI-compat | 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 |
| Pollinations.ai no cardno phone | 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 |
| Runware no cardno phonecommercial OK | 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 |
| Pinecone Inference no card | 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) no card | 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 |
| OCR.space no cardno phonecommercial OK | 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 |
| LlamaParse (LlamaCloud) no cardno phonecommercial OK | 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 |
| 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. | 2026-08-14 |
| Moondream Cloud no cardOpenAI-compat | 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 |
| Speechmatics no card | 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 |
| Speechify API no cardno phonecommercial OK | 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 |
| Hume AI (Octave TTS) no cardcommercial OK | 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 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. | 2026-08-14 |
| ElevenLabs no cardno phoneeval only | 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 |
| Sarvam AI no cardOpenAI-compat | 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 |
| Gladia no card | 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 |
| Rime no card | 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 |
| Tencent Hunyuan no cardOpenAI-compat | 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 |
| Voyage AI no card | 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 |
| Contextual AI no card | 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 |
| Cartesia no cardeval only | 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 |
| LMNT no cardeval only | 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 |
| Fish Audio no cardeval only | 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 |
| Camb.ai | 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 |
| Rev AI no card | 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 |
| Unstructured no card | 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 |
| Nutrient (Data Extraction API) no card | 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 no card | 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 |
| Upstage no cardcommercial OKOpenAI-compat | 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 |
| 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. | 2026-08-14 |
| Voicegain no card | 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 |
| Smallest.ai (Waves) no card | 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 |
| Retell AI card | 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 |
| Datalab (Marker / Surya) no card | 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 |
| W&B Inference no cardcommercial OKOpenAI-compat | 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 |
| 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. | 2026-08-14 |
FAQ
Are there free APIs for images, speech and embeddings — not just text?
Yes — the providers here reach beyond text on their free tier: vision, image generation, speech (STT/TTS), embeddings or rerank. See the modality-specific guides linked above.
Can one free API cover several modalities?
Some do — Google Gemini and Cloudflare Workers AI, for example, span text, vision, embeddings and more on a single free key. Each row lists the modalities that provider offers free.