Free tiers that reach beyond plain text — vision, image, audio/speech, embeddings or rerank on the free plan.
52 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 |
| 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 | 2026-10-08 |
| HuggingFace no cardOpenAI-compat | Ongoing | Free CPU Basic + ZeroGPU for Spaces; Inference Providers has no included credit on the Free plan (credits must be purchased) — $2.00/mo is included only on PRO/Team/Enterprise | Credits only apply with "Routed by Hugging Face" billing, not with a Custom Provider Key | 2026-10-08 |
| SiliconFlow no cardphoneOpenAI-compat | Ongoing | China platform (siliconflow.cn): several models permanently free at ¥0 (e.g. Qwen/Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct, tencent/Hunyuan-MT-7B, BAAI embeddings and rerankers). The international platform (siliconflow.com) lists no $0 LLMs and gives $1 in free credits instead | Free models live on the China platform and need real-name authentication to use all of them; accepted documents are a mainland ID card, HK/Macao or Taiwan travel permits, HK/Macao/Taiwan residence permits or a Chinese permanent-residence card for foreigners. Signup is by phone number; some virtual-carrier number ranges are blocked. | 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 |
| OVHcloud AI Endpoints no cardOpenAI-compat | Ongoing | Seven models are currently listed as Free: two Qwen3Guard moderation models, Stable Diffusion XL and four NVIDIA Riva TTS voices; 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 | 2026-10-08 |
| 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. Official rate limits apply once a valid payment method is registered; identity verification raises them. | 2026-10-08 |
| 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 |
| Clarifai no cardphoneOpenAI-compat | Trial | One-time $5 credit across serverless models (GPT-OSS-120B, Claude, Llama), vision, embeddings and image generation | Could not be re-verified on 2026-10-08: docs.clarifai.com no longer resolves and www.clarifai.com does not respond. Nebius has announced that Clarifai's core team joined Nebius and that it licensed Clarifai's inference technology. Treat this entry as likely discontinued. Previously recorded: SMS phone verification to claim a one-time $5 credit that expired 30 days after grant. | unverified |
| 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 |
| 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. | 2026-10-08 |
| ModelScope (API-Inference) no cardeval onlyOpenAI-compat | Ongoing | Free API-Inference calls paid with daily 'Magicubes': 200/day for signing in + 50/day after linking an Alibaba Cloud account (do not roll over); calls cost ~0.5 / 1 / 2 Magicubes for lightweight / standard / flagship models | 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. | 2026-10-08 |
| Pollinations.ai no cardno phoneOpenAI-compat | Trial | Quest Pollen: create an account, complete eligible Quests on the Quests dashboard and claim the rewards; Quest Pollen is spent before paid Pollen on regular (non-paid-only) models. No anonymous/no-key generation — every generation endpoint requires an API key and costs Pollen ($1 ≈ 1 Pollen). Text, image, video, audio, embeddings and 3D models behind one OpenAI-compatible API | The old anonymous 1 req/15s and Seed 1 req/5s tiers (and the watermark/nologo scheme) are gone from the current docs; the API moved to gen.pollinations.ai with keys from enter.pollinations.ai. Quest availability and reward amounts change ("the dashboard and the linked issue are the source of truth"). No credit card needed to try. Paid-only models require Paid Pollen. Commercial use is not explicitly addressed in the docs. The previous docs_url pointed at the stale master branch; the default branch is main. | 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 |
| Pinecone Inference no card | Ongoing | Starter (free) plan: 5M embedding tokens/month per model (llama-text-embed-v2, multilingual-e5-large, pinecone-sparse-english-v0) and 500 rerank requests/month (bge-reranker-v2-m3; the rate-limits doc also lists pinecone-rerank-v0 at 500) | Monthly limits are hard: reaching one returns 429 and you must upgrade (no pay-as-you-go overage on Starter). The pricing page lists only bge-reranker-v2-m3 as included on Starter while the rate-limits doc also lists pinecone-rerank-v0 at 500 — an internal inconsistency. Not OpenAI-compatible. Card requirement for Starter not stated on the pricing page or docs. No card was required at signup when last confirmed (2026-08); the current pages do not mention it. | 2026-10-08 |
| Twelve Labs (Marengo Embed) no card | Ongoing | Free plan: the Marengo 3.5 Embed API (video, audio, image, text and document inputs) and the Pegasus Analyze API at no cost, plus 600 minutes (10 hours) of video indexing in total | No credit card for the Free plan, but indexed data expires after 90 days unless upgraded. Marengo produces multimodal embeddings. Not OpenAI-compatible. | 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 |
| 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. Per the Terms (§5.2), data is not used to train Moondream's generally available models. Commercial terms for the hosted API not specified. OpenAI-compatible endpoint. | 2026-10-08 |
| Speechmatics no card | Trial | Free plan: $100 credit grant on signup (no payment card) for Speech-to-Text; Text-to-Speech lists the first 1 million characters free | One-time $100 credit grant, no card required; to go beyond it, add a card and move to Pro (pay-as-you-go). Accounts created before 1 August 2026 received a one-time $25 transition credit. No data logging for model training by default. Commercial-use permission not explicitly stated. | 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 |
| Hume AI (Octave TTS) no cardeval only | Ongoing | Free tier for Octave TTS and EVI; new accounts start with $20 in credits | Free and Starter tiers are non-commercial only (commercial use starts on Creator). The Free plan cannot buy overage, so going past it means upgrading. Not OpenAI-compatible. The former plan quota (10,000 characters/month) is no longer on a live official page: hume.ai/pricing redirected to the homepage on 2026-10-08. | 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 |
| 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 (commercial license starts on paid Starter, $6/mo); non-commercial use requires a personal email address. Free-plan credits do not roll over. API access is available on the free plan. No credit card to sign up. | 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 |
| 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. | 2026-10-08 |
| Rime no card | Trial | Free minutes for every new account (Starter plan): the pricing card says ~800 minutes (~800k characters), while the FAQ and docs say 3,000 | 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. | 2026-10-08 |
| Tencent Hunyuan no cardOpenAI-compat | Trial | One-time free package on first activation: 1,000,000 tokens shared across Hunyuan text/vision models (Hunyuan-a13b, Hunyuan-role-latest, Hunyuan-translation, Hunyuan-translation-lite, Tencent HY Vision 1.5 Instruct, Hunyuan-turbos-vision, Hunyuan-t1-vision, Hunyuan-turbos-vision-video), plus a separate 1,000,000 tokens for Hunyuan-embedding | Free resource package valid 1 year from activation; unused tokens expire, and it does not roll into pay-as-you-go automatically. Activation requires Tencent Cloud real-name verification (enterprise or personal) — a practical barrier for many non-China users. Tencent says Hunyuan is migrating to TokenHub: the legacy platform will add no new models and stops supporting new model-service purchases; the legacy ChatCompletions and GetEmbedding APIs are marked pre-offline with expected shutdown 2026-12-21 (the OpenAI-compatible endpoint is the documented alternative), and the same API page (updated 2026-09-23) says the old Hunyuan console goes offline on 30 September. Whether new activations still receive the free package after the migration is not stated. Commercial-use terms not stated on the free-quota page. | 2026-10-08 |
| Voyage AI no card | Trial | 200M free tokens per model on current embedding models (voyage-4-large, voyage-4, voyage-4-lite, voyage-context-4, voyage-code-4) and on the rerankers listed in the price table (rerank-3, rerank-3-lite); voyage-multimodal-3.5 and voyage-multimodal-3 get 200M text tokens + 150B pixels; legacy voyage-finance-2, voyage-law-2 and voyage-code-2 get 50M — a one-time complimentary allotment per account | The allotment is a one-time complimentary balance per model, not a renewing monthly quota. Free tokens do not apply to Batch API usage. Voyage's pricing page is internally inconsistent on rerankers: the prose still names the rerank-2.5/rerank-2 families as free, while the price table gives 200M free tokens to rerank-3 and rerank-3-lite and lists rerank-2.5 under older models with no free tokens. No credit card required to claim. Owned by MongoDB — a first-party model provider, not a proxy. | 2026-10-08 |
| 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. | 2026-10-08 |
| 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). | 2026-10-08 |
| Fish Audio no cardeval only | Ongoing | App Free plan: 8,000 credits/month (~7 min, up to 500 characters per generation). API: the s2.1-pro-free TTS model is $0 through 2026-11-30 under fair-use limits (pay-as-you-go API, no subscription) | Free app plan is personal, non-commercial only (commercial use requires Premium). The $0 API model s2.1-pro-free is pitched for testing, prototyping and smaller businesses but has no TTFA/DPA guarantees. No credit card required for the Free plan. | 2026-10-08 |
| Camb.ai | Trial | Free plan: 5,000 credits one-time (no monthly renewal) across TTS, dubbing, speech and translation tools | Uses its own MARS voice models (not OpenAI-compatible). Free credits are a one-time grant, not monthly. Per-feature limits (characters per generation, watermarking) are not readable on the current pricing page. Card and commercial terms not stated on the pricing page. | 2026-10-08 |
| Rev AI no card | Trial | Free credits equivalent to 5 hours of Reverb ASR (speech-to-text), usable across all Rev AI products | Free credits granted at signup (renewal/expiry not stated). High-accuracy English ASR. No credit card required (stated on the signup page). Commercial terms not stated. | 2026-10-08 |
| Unstructured no card | Trial | 10,000 free pages once per account — document parsing/OCR (layout, tables, generative OCR enrichment); then $0.015/page pay-as-you-go | No credit card required. The free pages are a one-time credit per account (not monthly); after 10,000 pages, processing requests fail until you upgrade to Pay-As-You-Go. Purpose-built to turn documents into clean, structured input for RAG/LLM pipelines. Commercial terms not stated on the pricing page. | 2026-10-08 |
| 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. | 2026-10-08 |
| 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). | 2026-10-08 |
| 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 |
| 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 platform credit on signup; afterwards cloud STT is billed at $0.00020/second of audio (6-second minimum per request). Commercial terms not stated on the pricing page. Native STT REST API. The former /pricing URL now redirects to /developers. | 2026-10-08 |
| Smallest.ai (Waves) | Trial | $10 in free credits with full access on Pay As You Go — TTS (Lightning v3.1), STT (Pulse) and voice agents; speech-to-speech (Hydra) is beta/request-access | $10 starting credit on Pay As You Go. The models pricing page lists 15 concurrent TTS streams while the API reference still says 1 active TTS request per account — inconsistent. The models table shows Voice Cloning 'No' for Pay As You Go although the TTS card advertises instant cloning. Card and commercial terms not stated. /pricing now redirects to /pricing/agents. | 2026-10-08 |
| Retell AI no card | Trial | $10 in free trial credits (once per email address) plus 20 concurrent calls included — voice-agent orchestration (STT + LLM + TTS) | $10 trial credit with full platform access, granted once per email address. A payment method is required only to buy phone numbers or use the service beyond the free trial. A voice-agent builder (orchestration), not a raw model API. Voice agents cost ~$0.07-$0.31/min after the credit. | 2026-10-08 |
| Datalab (Marker / Surya) no cardno phone | Ongoing | $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, 25 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). Signup does not require a phone number; checked via Google signup flow on 2026-10-02. | 2026-10-02 |
| 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
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.