What's free
$10 in free credit on signup (no card) — Solar LLM (chat + embeddings) plus Document Parse / OCR / information extraction
Rate limits
Document Parse billed $0.01/page (+$0.03 for extract), drawn from the $10 credit
The catch
No credit card required to receive the $10 credit; Studio agents also include 10 free runs. A separate institutional grant (up to 1 year of free Solar + Document Parse) exists for eligible organizations only. Credit validity period not stated.
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
Free LLM APIs with no credit cardFree LLM APIs for commercial useOpenAI-compatible free LLM APIsFree multimodal LLM APIsOpenAI-compatibleEmbeddings / RAGOCR / document AI
Change history
How this free tier has changed since we started tracking it (2026-07-30) — generated from the git history of providers.json.
- 2026-07-31 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