What's free
China platform (siliconflow.cn): several models permanently free at ¥0 (e.g. Qwen/Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct, tencent/Hunyuan-MT-7B, BAAI embeddings and rerankers). The international platform (siliconflow.com) lists no $0 LLMs and gives $1 in free credits instead
- Credit card
- not required
- Phone verification
- required
- Commercial use
- not confirmed
Free limits
Numeric limits are not recorded in structured form for this provider.
In the provider's words
Fixed per-model limits for free models; generic docs cite ranges of 1,000-10,000 RPM and 50,000-5,000,000 TPM depending on model tier — exact limits shown in-account
The catch
Free models live on the China platform and need real-name authentication to use all of them; accepted documents are a mainland ID card, HK/Macao or Taiwan travel permits, HK/Macao/Taiwan residence permits or a Chinese permanent-residence card for foreigners. Signup is by phone number; some virtual-carrier number ranges are blocked.
Free models: not listed yet.
Quickstart — chat completions
from openai import OpenAI
client = OpenAI(base_url="https://api.siliconflow.cn/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.siliconflow.cn/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, the catch
- 2026-08-14 Updated card requirement
- 2026-07-30 Added to the hub