What's free
$10 free credit on sign-up (per Upstage's Getting Started docs) for the API — Solar LLM (chat + embeddings) plus Document Parse / OCR / information extraction; Studio document agents include 10 free runs each
- Credit card
- not required
- Phone verification
- not confirmed
- Commercial use
- allowed
Free limits
Numeric limits are not recorded in structured form for this provider.
In the provider's words
Tier 0 (below the Explore commitment tier): Solar Pro 4 100 RPM / 250,000 TPM; Solar Mini 4 100 RPM / 50,000 TPM; Embeddings 100 RPM / 300,000 TPM; Document OCR 3 requests/second, 500 pages/minute
The catch
The Solar Pro 4 free window (2026-08-05 to 2026-08-11) has ended; standard pricing is $0.30 input / $1.20 output per 1M tokens from 2026-10-11 (UTC), after a 70%-off phase that runs until 2026-10-10. Beyond the signup credit, API use is pay-per-use, with prepaid commitment tiers from $100/mo adding bonus credit and higher limits. Studio agent runs need no card. A separate institutional grant (up to 1 year of free Solar Pro + Document Parse) exists for eligible schools, hospitals and nonprofits only. Solar Pro 2/3 and Solar Mini are deprecated on 2026-10-30 (KST).
Free models: not listed yet.
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
Compare
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
- 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