| Field | Ollama Cloud | OpenRouter |
|---|---|---|
| Type | Ongoing free tier · renewing-quota | Ongoing free tier · renewing-quota |
| What's free | $0 Free plan: starter amount of cloud usage credits, limited to a smaller set of starter models; buying credits unlocks all cloud models | A rotating set of models with a :free suffix (16 on 2026-10-08; count fluctuates), single API across many providers |
| Rate limits | 1 concurrent request on the free plan; included usage resets monthly from signup date (dollar amount of starter credits not published) | 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 | 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. | 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 confirmed | not required |
| Phone verification | not required | not required |
| Commercial use | allowed | allowed |
| OpenAI-compatible | yeshttps://ollama.com/v1 | yeshttps://openrouter.ai/api/v1 |
| Modalities | text, vision | text, vision |
| Free models (sample) | no sample | 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 | docs.ollama.com/cloud | openrouter.ai/docs/api-reference/limits |
| Last verified | 2026-10-08 | 2026-10-08 |