| Field | Google Gemini API (AI Studio) | OpenRouter |
|---|---|---|
| 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 | A rotating set of models with a :free suffix (16 on 2026-10-08; count fluctuates), single API across many providers |
| 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 | 20 req/min; 50 req/day under 10 credits purchased lifetime, 1000 req/day once 10+ credits purchased (one-time, not a subscription) |
| 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 | ToS (Jul 2026) prohibits reselling API access or building a competing service — platform-wide, not just the free models; per-model terms still apply |
| Credit card | not required | not required |
| Phone verification | not required | not required |
| Commercial use | allowed | allowed |
| OpenAI-compatible | yeshttps://generativelanguage.googleapis.com/v1beta/openai/ | yeshttps://openrouter.ai/api/v1 |
| Modalities | text, vision, embeddings, audio | text, vision |
| Free models (sample) | gemini-2.5-flash gemini-2.5-flash-lite gemini-2.5-pro | cohere/north-mini-code:free google/gemma-4-26b-a4b-it:free google/gemma-4-31b-it:free liquid/lfm-2.5-2.6b:free nvidia/nemotron-3-nano-omni-30b-a3b-reasoning:free poolside/laguna-s-2.1:free |
| Official docs | ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/rate-limits | openrouter.ai/docs/api-reference/limits |
| Last verified | 2026-10-08 | 2026-10-08 |