What's free
Quest Pollen: create an account, complete eligible Quests on the Quests dashboard and claim the rewards; Quest Pollen is spent before paid Pollen on regular (non-paid-only) models. No anonymous/no-key generation — every generation endpoint requires an API key and costs Pollen ($1 ≈ 1 Pollen). Text, image, video, audio, embeddings and 3D models behind one OpenAI-compatible API
- Credit card
- not required
- Phone verification
- not required
- Commercial use
- not confirmed
Free limits
Numeric limits are not recorded in structured form for this provider.
In the provider's words
No per-request rate limits published for sk_ keys; usage is bounded by the Pollen balance (legacy raw pk_ keys: 1 Pollen per IP per hour)
The catch
The old anonymous 1 req/15s and Seed 1 req/5s tiers (and the watermark/nologo scheme) are gone from the current docs; the API moved to gen.pollinations.ai with keys from enter.pollinations.ai. Quest availability and reward amounts change ("the dashboard and the linked issue are the source of truth"). No credit card needed to try. Paid-only models require Paid Pollen. Commercial use is not explicitly addressed in the docs. The previous docs_url pointed at the stale master branch; the default branch is main.
Free models: not listed yet.
Quickstart — chat completions
from openai import OpenAI
client = OpenAI(base_url="https://gen.pollinations.ai/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://gen.pollinations.ai/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
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Change history
How this free tier has changed since we started tracking it (2026-07-30) — generated from the git history of providers.json.
- 2026-10-08 Updated free tier, rate limits, the catch, free type, OpenAI compatibility
- 2026-07-30 Added to the hub