What's free
$20/month (work email) or $10/month (personal email) free usage allowance — OCR in 90+ languages, PDF-to-markdown, tables, forms and structured extraction
Rate limits
10 requests/min on the free tier; per-page pricing (see datalab.to/pricing)
The catch
Landing page still advertises a $5 signup credit, but the billing page describes the current free tier as a recurring monthly allowance ($20/mo work email, $10/mo personal, no card, 10 req/min) “designed to let you run a complete proof of concept before committing to a paid plan” — no explicit statement on commercial use of the hosted API. The self-hosted OSS weights carry a separate restriction (research/personal/startups under $2M ARR/funding).
Quickstart
First-party API — not OpenAI-compatible, so there is no drop-in base URL. The exact endpoint is in the official docs; authenticate with your API key in the Authorization: Bearer header.
curl -H "Authorization: Bearer $API_KEY" \
https://<api-base-url>/<endpoint>…or in Python:
import os, requests
r = requests.post(
"https:///",
headers={"Authorization": f"Bearer {os.environ['API_KEY']}"},
json={},
)
print(r.json()) Appears in
Change history
How this free tier has changed since we started tracking it (2026-07-31) — generated from the git history of providers.json.
- 2026-08-13 Updated free tier, rate limits, the catch, free type, card requirement
- 2026-07-31 Added to the hub