What's free
Solar Pro 4 is free for a limited time (promo); otherwise the API is paid prepaid (commitment tiers from $100/mo) — Solar LLM (chat + embeddings) plus Document Parse / OCR / information extraction; Studio agents include 10 free runs
Rate limits
Document Parse billed $0.01/page (+$0.03 for extract); Tier 1 rate limits apply on prepaid tiers
The catch
The former $10 signup credit no longer appears on the pricing page (now prepaid commitment tiers from $100/mo). No card needed for the limited-time free model or the 10 free Studio runs; a separate institutional grant (up to 1 year of free Solar + Document Parse) exists for eligible organizations only.
Quickstart — chat completions
from openai import OpenAI
client = OpenAI(base_url="https://api.upstage.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://api.upstage.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
Change history
How this free tier has changed since we started tracking it (2026-07-30) — generated from the git history of providers.json.
- 2026-08-14 Updated free tier, rate limits, the catch
- 2026-07-31 Updated free tier, rate limits, the catch, commercial-use terms, card requirement, OpenAI compatibility
- 2026-07-30 Updated free tier, the catch
- 2026-07-30 Added to the hub