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.
39 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 when used outside the UK/CH/EEA/EU | 2026-07-11 |
| 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 | 2026-07-11 |
| OpenRouter no cardno phonecommercial OKOpenAI-compat | Ongoing | 20+ models with a :free suffix, single API across many providers | ToS (Apr 2026) prohibits resale or building a competing service on the free models; a private proxy for personal use is fine | 2026-07-11 |
| 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 | 2026-07-11 |
| GitHub Models no cardno phoneeval onlyOpenAI-compat | Ongoing | Included with any GitHub account via the Copilot tier | Scoped by GitHub to experimentation/prototyping, not production traffic | 2026-07-11 |
| 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 | 2026-07-30 |
| 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 | 2026-07-30 |
| Fireworks AI no cardOpenAI-compat | Trial | $1 trial credit | Default monthly spend cap of $50 for new accounts; no card needed to activate the $1 credit, card needed once it's spent | 2026-07-11 |
| AI21 Labs no card | Trial | $10 trial credit, valid 3 months | Card not required for the trial credit itself, required once it expires | 2026-07-11 |
| 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 | 2026-07-30 |
| 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). | 2026-07-30 |
| Vercel AI Gateway no cardOpenAI-compat | Trial | Free tier with a monthly free credit covering a subset of models at lower rate limits | Free tier and its monthly-credit behaviour are confirmed in Vercel's own docs; the specific "$5/month" figure circulating in community posts is not stated there. Once you purchase credits, your account moves to the paid tier and the monthly free credit no longer applies. | 2026-07-30 |
| Jina AI no cardno phonecommercial OKOpenAI-compat | Trial | 10M free tokens (one-time) across all models — embeddings (v3/v4), 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. | 2026-07-30 |
| 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. | 2026-07-30 |
| 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. | 2026-07-30 |
| 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. | 2026-07-30 |
| 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. | 2026-07-30 |
| 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. | 2026-07-30 |
| 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. | 2026-07-30 |
| 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. | 2026-07-30 |
| 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. | 2026-07-30 |
| 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. | 2026-07-30 |
| 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. | 2026-07-30 |
| 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. | 2026-07-30 |
| 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. | 2026-07-30 |
| 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). | 2026-07-30 |
| 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; no credit card required to start. Paid plans start at $100/month afterwards. | 2026-07-30 |
| Speechmatics no card | Ongoing | 3,000 minutes (50 hours)/month speech-to-text + 1,000,000 characters (~20 hrs)/month text-to-speech | No credit card required to start; add a card only when you exceed the free limit. Recurring monthly allowance covering both STT and TTS. Commercial-use permission not explicitly stated on the pricing page. | 2026-07-30 |
| 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. | 2026-07-30 |
| 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. | 2026-07-30 |
| 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. | 2026-07-30 |
| Voyage AI no card | Trial | 200M free tokens on current embedding models (voyage-4, voyage-4-lite, voyage-context-4, voyage-code-3) and on rerankers (rerank-2.5 family); voyage-multimodal-3.5 gets 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. | 2026-07-31 |
| 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. | 2026-07-31 |
| 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. | 2026-07-31 |
| 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. | 2026-07-31 |
| 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). | 2026-07-31 |
| Upstage no cardcommercial OKOpenAI-compat | Trial | $10 in free credit on signup (no card) — Solar LLM (chat + embeddings) plus Document Parse / OCR / information extraction | No credit card required to receive the $10 credit; Studio agents also include 10 free runs. A separate institutional grant (up to 1 year of free Solar + Document Parse) exists for eligible organizations only. Credit validity period not stated. | 2026-07-31 |
| 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. | 2026-07-31 |
| 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. | 2026-07-31 |
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.