Every provider below offers free API access with no card required to get started (card_required: false, confirmed against their own docs). Rows where the requirement is unknown are excluded rather than assumed.
59 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 |
| Mistral (La Plateforme) no cardphoneeval onlyOpenAI-compat | 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 |
| 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 |
| Fireworks AI no cardOpenAI-compat | 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 |
| Novita AI no cardeval onlyOpenAI-compat | 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 |
| AI21 Labs no cardOpenAI-compat | 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) no cardOpenAI-compat | 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 |
| SambaNova Cloud no cardcommercial OKOpenAI-compat | 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 |
| 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 |
| NVIDIA NIM no cardphoneeval onlyOpenAI-compat | 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 |
| Vercel AI Gateway no cardOpenAI-compat | 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 |
| 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 |
| 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 |
| Poolside no cardOpenAI-compat | 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 |
| 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 |
| 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
Can I use an LLM API for free without a credit card?
Yes — every provider on this page offers a free tier with no card required, confirmed against its own docs. You are limited by rate, not billing.
Will I be charged if I go over the free limit?
No. Without a payment method on file you get rate-limited (HTTP 429) rather than billed — you would have to add a card before any spend is possible.