A cheat-sheet of AI/inference API free tiers, and a private tracker that reminds you to cancel before a trial quietly turns into a bill. It watches dates, not your wallet — you still sign up for things yourself and cancel them yourself.
A starting point, not a guarantee — hand-compiled, not live-checked against provider pages. Terms shift constantly and without notice: rate limits change, credit amounts change, "free" becomes "free with a card on file" becomes "gone." Verify on the provider's own pricing page before you rely on any of this.
| provider | what's free | notes |
|---|---|---|
| Google AI Studio (Gemini) | Ongoing free tier, rate-limited | No card required for the free tier; usage may train on your data unless you're on a paid tier. |
| Groq | Ongoing free tier, rate-limited | Fast open-weight inference; free tier caps requests/tokens per minute. |
| Mistral (La Plateforme) | Free "experiment" tier | Rate-limited, meant for testing, not production traffic. |
| Cohere | Free trial API key | Rate-limited trial key, separate from paid production keys. |
| OpenRouter | Free routes to some open models | A subset of models are free/donated; others are pass-through billed. |
| Hugging Face Inference | Free-tier serverless inference | Rate-limited and best-effort; dedicated endpoints are paid. |
| Nvidia NIM | Sign-up API credits | build.nvidia.com gives free credits per model to try hosted NIM endpoints; self-hosting NIM containers past the eval period needs a paid enterprise license. |
| Together AI / Fireworks AI | Sign-up credit | One-time credit on account creation historically; card usually required once it runs out. |
| Modal | Monthly compute credit | Recurring free compute allowance for serverless GPU/CPU jobs. |
| Replicate | Occasional sign-up credit | Varies; many models bill per-second from the first run. |
| AWS / GCP / Azure (general) | New-account cloud credit | Broad cloud credit, not AI-specific — covers Bedrock/Vertex/Azure OpenAI usage but expires on a clock. |
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