| Field | Jina AI | SambaNova Cloud |
|---|---|---|
| Type | Trial credit · trial-credit | Ongoing free tier · renewing-quota |
| What's free | 10M free tokens (one-time) across all models — embeddings, rerankers, classifier; plus a keyless Reader (r.jina.ai) for basic use | Rate-limited free tier (applies when no payment method is linked) across all models |
| Rate limits | Free key: 100 RPM / 100k TPM for embeddings & reranker; Reader 20 RPM keyless, 500 RPM with a free key | Free Tier: 20 RPM / 20 RPD / 200,000 TPD across all models; Developer Tier (card required): 60-240 RPM depending on model |
| Expires | no expiry | no expiry |
| The catch | 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. | 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). As of 2026-10-08 SambaNova's own pages disagree: the rate-limits doc still describes this no-card Free Tier, while the plans page says to add a payment method and buy credits before the first request. Needs a hands-on signup check. |
| Credit card | not required | not required |
| Phone verification | not required | not confirmed |
| Commercial use | allowed | allowed |
| OpenAI-compatible | yeshttps://api.jina.ai/v1 | yeshttps://api.sambanova.ai/v1 |
| Modalities | text, image, embeddings, rerank | text |
| Free models (sample) | no sample | DeepSeek-V3.1 Meta-Llama-3.3-70B-Instruct gpt-oss-120b |
| Official docs | jina.ai/embeddings/ | cloud.sambanova.ai/plans |
| Last verified | 2026-10-08 | 2026-08-13 |