Free AI & developer APIs
56 AI and developer APIs with a real free tier or trial: LLMs, speech, search, scraping, databases, auth and email. Every limit links to the official pricing page and shows the date we checked it.
Free LLM APIs →
| API | Free tier | Auth | Checked on |
|---|---|---|---|
| Google Gemini API | Free tier (no billing) on Flash/Flash-Lite models incl. gemini-3.8-flash, gemini-3.6-flash, gemini-3.5-flash-lite, gemini-2.5-pro/flash/flash-lite, plus Flash TTS… | API key (x-goog-api-key) | 17 Oct 2026 |
| Groq API | Free plan per-model limits, e.g. openai/gpt-oss-120b and gpt-oss-20b: 30 RPM, 1K RPD, 8K TPM, 200K TPD; qwen/qwen3.8-27b: 30 RPM, 1K RPD, 8K TPM, 200K TPD… | API key (Bearer), OpenAI-compatible | 17 Oct 2026 |
| OpenRouter (free models) | Models with IDs ending in ":free": 20 requests/min; 50 requests/day if you have purchased <10 credits all-time, 1000 requests/day if you have purchased ≥10 credits.… | API key (Bearer), OpenAI-compatible | 17 Oct 2026 |
| Mistral AI API (Free mode) | "Free mode": API access enabled by default, no credit card; "usage and rate limits apply". Exact free limits (requests/sec, tokens/min, tokens/month per model) are not… | API key (Bearer) | 17 Oct 2026 |
| Cloudflare Workers AI | 10,000 Neurons per day free on both Workers Free and Paid plans (resets 00:00 UTC); beyond that requires Workers Paid at $0.011 per 1,000 Neurons. Some models require a… | Cloudflare API token (Bearer) or Workers binding | 17 Oct 2026 |
| NVIDIA API Catalog (build.nvidia.com) | "All models on build.nvidia.com are free to prototype with"; free tier is rate-limited "up to 40 requests per minute (RPM) for most models, with no per-token billing". | API key (Bearer), OpenAI-compatible | 17 Oct 2026 |
| Cohere API (trial key) | Trial (evaluation) keys: 1,000 API calls per month; per-endpoint trial rate limits (e.g. Command A+ chat 20 req/min, audio transcription 5 req/min). | API key (Bearer) | 17 Oct 2026 |
| Cerebras Inference (Free Trial) | Not permanently free: new accounts get $5 in credits after adding a verified payment method, expiring 30 days after grant; per-model Free Trial rate limits apply. | API key (Bearer), OpenAI-compatible | 17 Oct 2026 |
| Vercel AI Gateway | Every Vercel team gets $5/month in AI Gateway credits on "Free Tier eligible models" (a subset); free-tier requests are rate-limited per model, lower than paid. Credits… | API key or Vercel OIDC token, OpenAI-compatible | 17 Oct 2026 |
| Z.ai (GLM) API | GLM-4.7-Flash, GLM-4.5-Flash and GLM-4.6V-Flash listed as "Free" (input, cached input, output). Several larger GLM models show "Limited-time Free" only for cached-input… | API key (Bearer), OpenAI-compatible | 17 Oct 2026 |
| Scaleway Generative APIs | Free tier: 1 million tokens and 60 minutes of audio transcription (to try models); some models (e.g. lightonocr) listed as Free. | API key (Bearer), OpenAI-compatible | 17 Oct 2026 |
| Ollama Cloud | Free plan: run models locally plus "starter usage credits" for cloud models and access to starter models. Credit amount and limits: unknown (not stated). | API key (Bearer) | 17 Oct 2026 |
Free embedding & image APIs →
| API | Free tier | Auth | Checked on |
|---|---|---|---|
| Voyage AI Embeddings | First 200 million tokens free per account for voyage-4-large, voyage-4, voyage-4-lite, voyage-context-4, voyage-code-4; 50M free for voyage-finance-2/law-2/code-2; free… | API key (Bearer) | 17 Oct 2026 |
| Jina AI Embeddings / Reranker | "Start with a free trial"; free API key with lower rate limits than paid. Free token amount not stated in static page text: unknown. jina-embeddings-v4 is free but… | API key (Bearer) | 17 Oct 2026 |
| Stability AI Platform API | 25 free credits at signup (1 credit = $0.01); e.g. Stable Image Ultra costs 8 credits per image. | API key (Bearer) | 17 Oct 2026 |
| Cloudinary | Free plan "free forever", no credit card: 25 monthly credits, 3 users / 1 account; upload, transformations, CDN delivery, free add-ons. | API key + secret (signed requests) / unsigned upload presets | 17 Oct 2026 |
Free speech-to-text & TTS APIs →
| API | Free tier | Auth | Checked on |
|---|---|---|---|
| Deepgram | Free $200 credit, no credit card required, no expiration stated ("No minimums. No expiration."), then pay-as-you-go. | API key (Token) | 17 Oct 2026 |
| AssemblyAI | Free tier, no credit card: up to 185 hours of pre-recorded transcription and up to 333 hours of streaming transcription. | API key (Authorization header) | 17 Oct 2026 |
| ElevenLabs API | Free plan: 10,000 characters/month included (~10 minutes of TTS). | API key (xi-api-key) | 17 Oct 2026 |
| Gladia | Start with €50 free credits (self-serve async and real-time STT). | API key (x-gladia-key) | 17 Oct 2026 |
| Speechmatics | Start free with $100 in credits, no card required; real-time free accounts limited to 2 concurrent sessions; TTS: first 1 million characters free (~20 hours). | API key (Bearer) | 17 Oct 2026 |
| Groq Whisper (speech-to-text) | Part of Groq free plan: whisper-large-v3 and whisper-large-v3-turbo at 20 RPM, 2K RPD, 7,200 audio-seconds/hour, 28,800 audio-seconds/day. | API key (Bearer), OpenAI-compatible /audio/transcriptions | 17 Oct 2026 |
Free web search APIs for AI agents →
| API | Free tier | Auth | Checked on |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tavily Search API | 1,000 free API credits every month, no credit card. | API key (Bearer) | 17 Oct 2026 |
| Exa Search API | Starter (Free): $10 credits every month plus a $10 onboarding bonus, no payment method required. | API key (x-api-key) | 17 Oct 2026 |
| Brave Search API | "Up to $20 in free calls every month"; prepaid credits, no subscription. | API key (X-Subscription-Token) | 17 Oct 2026 |
| Serper (Google SERP API) | 2,500 free queries, no credit card required (one-time vs monthly not stated: assume one-time; unknown). | API key (X-API-KEY) | 17 Oct 2026 |
| SerpApi | Free plan $0/month: 250 searches per month, 50 throughput per hour. | API key (query param) | 17 Oct 2026 |
| Linkup | "Run 4,000 queries for free" (period not stated: unknown). | API key (Bearer) | 17 Oct 2026 |
Free web scraping & browser APIs →
| API | Free tier | Auth | Checked on |
|---|---|---|---|
| Firecrawl | Free plan: 1,000 credits/month, no card. | API key (Bearer) | 17 Oct 2026 |
| ScrapingBee | 1,000 free API credits at signup, no credit card. | API key (query param) | 17 Oct 2026 |
| Browserbase | Free plan $0/mo: 3 concurrent browsers, 1 browser hour, 3 agent runs, 1,000 search calls, 1,000 fetch calls, 15 min/session, $5 in model tokens. | API key (X-BB-API-Key) | 17 Oct 2026 |
| Apify | Free plan $0: $5/month to spend in Apify Store or on your own Actors; $0.2 per compute unit; no credit card. | API token (Bearer) | 17 Oct 2026 |
| ScraperAPI | 7-day trial with 5,000 API credits, no credit card (trial, not a permanent free tier). | API key (query param) | 17 Oct 2026 |
| Steel | Launch plan $0/month + usage: $30 of credits one time, 10 concurrent browser sessions, sessions up to 15 minutes. | API key (steel-api-key header) | 17 Oct 2026 |
Free database, vector & storage APIs →
| API | Free tier | Auth | Checked on |
|---|---|---|---|
| Supabase | Free plan: unlimited API requests, 50,000 MAU (auth), 500 MB database, shared CPU/500 MB RAM, 5 GB egress, 5 GB cached egress, 1 GB file storage; paused after 1 week… | anon/publishable key + service key; JWT | 17 Oct 2026 |
| Neon Postgres | Free plan, no time limit, no card: 100 projects, 100 CU-hours/month per project, 1 GB storage per project, autoscaling up to 2 CU (8 GB RAM); Neon Auth up to 60k MAU. | Postgres connection string / API key | 17 Oct 2026 |
| Turso (libSQL/SQLite) | Free $0/month: 100 databases, 5 GB storage, 500 million monthly rows read, 10 million monthly rows written, 3 GB monthly syncs, 1 day point-in-time restore. | Database auth token | 17 Oct 2026 |
| Upstash Redis | Free: 250 MB data, 10 GB monthly bandwidth, 500K monthly commands. | REST token (Bearer) / Redis password | 17 Oct 2026 |
| MongoDB Atlas (M0) | M0 cluster "Free forever": 512 MB storage, shared RAM/vCPU. | Connection string; Atlas Data/Admin API keys | 17 Oct 2026 |
| Pinecone (Starter) | Starter plan free: up to 2 GB storage, up to 2M write units/month, up to 1M read units/month (plus inference allowances). | API key (Api-Key header) | 17 Oct 2026 |
| Qdrant Cloud | Free tier "free forever": single-node cluster 0.5 vCPU / 1 GB RAM / 4 GB disk; free cloud inference with selected models. | API key (api-key header) | 17 Oct 2026 |
| Firebase (Spark plan) | No-cost Spark plan, no payment method: Firestore 1 GiB stored, 50K document reads/day (more quotas on page); Authentication up to 50K MAU (SAML/OIDC 50 MAU). | Firebase config + service account | 17 Oct 2026 |
| Convex | Free & Starter: $0/month (then pay as you go), 1-6 developers; 1M function calls included, 0.5 GB database storage, 20 GB-hours action compute; file storage, text +… | Deploy key / client URL | 17 Oct 2026 |
| Cloudflare D1 | Workers Free: 5 million rows read/day, 100,000 rows written/day, 5 GB total storage. | Workers binding / API token | 17 Oct 2026 |
| Cloudflare R2 | Free each month: 10 GB-month storage, 1 million Class A ops, 10 million Class B ops; egress free. Standard storage only. | S3 access keys / API token | 17 Oct 2026 |
| UploadThing | $0/month app: 2 GB storage (shared across apps), unlimited uploads and downloads, 7 days audit log retention. | API key / token | 17 Oct 2026 |
Free auth APIs →
| API | Free tier | Auth | Checked on |
|---|---|---|---|
| Clerk | Hobby (Free, no card): 50,000 MRU per app, unlimited applications, up to 3 dashboard seats, prebuilt sign-in/up UIs, custom domain, fixed 7-day sessions. | Publishable + secret key | 17 Oct 2026 |
| Auth0 | Free $0/month, no card: up to 25,000 monthly active users, 1 custom domain, passwordless, unlimited social connections. | Client ID/secret (OAuth/OIDC) | 17 Oct 2026 |
| WorkOS AuthKit | User management free up to 1 million users (then $2,500/mo per additional 1M); Radar free tier 1K. | API key + client ID | 17 Oct 2026 |
Free email APIs →
| API | Free tier | Auth | Checked on |
|---|---|---|---|
| Resend | Free $0/mo: 3,000 emails/month, 100 emails/day, 3 domains, 3 inboxes. | API key (Bearer) | 17 Oct 2026 |
| Brevo (transactional email) | Free plan forever, no card; once account is approved, send up to 300 emails per day. | API key (api-key header) / SMTP | 17 Oct 2026 |
| Mailgun | Free $0/mo: 100 emails/day included. | API key (Basic auth) | 17 Oct 2026 |
| Postmark | Free developer tier: 100 emails/month, no overages, no credit card. | Server token (X-Postmark-Server-Token) | 17 Oct 2026 |
Free LLM gateway & observability tools →
| API | Free tier | Auth | Checked on |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cloudflare AI Gateway | Core features (analytics, caching, rate limiting, DLP) free on all plans; log storage on Workers Free: 100,000 logs total across all gateways. | Cloudflare account; proxies your provider keys | 17 Oct 2026 |
| Sentry | Developer plan free: one user, error monitoring and tracing, email alerts, 10 custom dashboards (event quotas on page). | DSN (public key) + auth token | 17 Oct 2026 |
| PostHog | Free every month (with or without card): 1M analytics events, 5K session recordings, 1M feature-flag requests, 100K exceptions, 1,500 survey responses, 1M rows data… | Project API key (public) + personal API key | 17 Oct 2026 |
Checked and excluded
We looked at these and left them out. Reasons as of 17 Oct 2026:
- GitHub Models: Retired July 30, 2026 (docs.github.com/en/github-models)
- Hugging Face Inference Providers: Free users get no monthly credits now (only PRO $2/mo, Team/Enterprise); free users must buy credits (huggingface.co/docs/inference-providers/pricing)
- SambaNova Cloud: Docs and plans page conflict on whether a free tier exists without a payment method; not verified
- Together AI / Fireworks / Replicate / fal.ai: No free inference tier stated on their pricing pages today (Fireworks only a time-limited free fine-tune promo)
- OpenAI / Anthropic / DeepSeek / Perplexity APIs: No free API tier
- MailerSend / SendGrid: Only a 14-day / free trial stated, no ongoing free quota
- Pollinations: Official pricing page 404 today; not verified
Each free tier was read from the provider’s official pricing or limits page on 17 Oct 2026 and is linked as the source. Anything the page does not state is written as unknown. Free tiers change often, so confirm before you build on one.
Want to try a free model right now? Open the AI Playground. Self-hosting instead? See open-source AI tools.