| Field | Google Gemini API (AI Studio) | Ollama Cloud |
|---|---|---|
| Type | Ongoing free tier · renewing-quota | Ongoing free tier · renewing-quota |
| What's free | Gemini 2.5 Flash, 2.5 Flash-Lite, 2.5 Pro (limited), embeddings, TTS models | $0 Free plan: starter amount of cloud usage credits, limited to a smaller set of starter models; buying credits unlocks all cloud models |
| Rate limits | Per-model; Google no longer publishes the free-tier numbers in its public docs — they are shown only on the AI Studio rate-limit page after sign-in | 1 concurrent request on the free plan; included usage resets monthly from signup date (dollar amount of starter credits not published) |
| Expires | no expiry | no expiry |
| The catch | 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 | 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. |
| Credit card | not required | not confirmed |
| Phone verification | not required | not required |
| Commercial use | allowed | allowed |
| OpenAI-compatible | yeshttps://generativelanguage.googleapis.com/v1beta/openai/ | yeshttps://ollama.com/v1 |
| Modalities | text, vision, embeddings, audio | text, vision |
| Free models (sample) | gemini-2.5-flash gemini-2.5-flash-lite gemini-2.5-pro | no sample |
| Official docs | ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/rate-limits | docs.ollama.com/cloud |
| Last verified | 2026-10-08 | 2026-10-08 |