What's free
One-time $5 credit across serverless models (GPT-OSS-120B, Claude, Llama), vision, embeddings and image generation
Rate limits
15 requests/second global default (CONN_THROTTLED on exceed)
The catch
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. Checked ToS (clarifai.com/company/terms, effective 2025-10-01) and billing docs (docs.clarifai.com/control/account-billing/) for commercial/production-use language. No clause restricts the $5 trial credit / Pay-As-You-Go tier to evaluation-only. The 'evaluation purposes only, not for production' language in §7.3 applies specifically to Beta Releases, not this plan. No explicit statement either way, so left null per contribution guidelines.
Quickstart — chat completions
from openai import OpenAI
client = OpenAI(base_url="https://api.clarifai.com/v2/ext/openai/v1", api_key="<YOUR_FREE_API_KEY>")
resp = client.chat.completions.create(
model="<a-free-model>",
messages=[{"role": "user", "content": "Hello!"}],
)
print(resp.choices[0].message.content)…or with curl:
curl https://api.clarifai.com/v2/ext/openai/v1/chat/completions \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $API_KEY" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{"model":"<a-free-model>","messages":[{"role":"user","content":"Hello!"}]}'Appears in
Change history
How this free tier has changed since we started tracking it (2026-07-30) — generated from the git history of providers.json.
- 2026-08-12 Updated the catch
- 2026-07-30 Added to the hub