AIREITERFree AI API limits at a glance
"Free" in the AI API world almost never means unlimited. It means a rate-limited tier — sometimes a permanent quota, sometimes promotional credits that run out. The providers below all issue API keys without requiring a credit card, but the usable volume ranges from a handful of requests per day to tens of thousands.
The figures in this guide were checked against each provider's official documentation in August 2026. Rate limits change frequently; always confirm against the provider's console before relying on a number for production planning.
| Provider | Key free-tier facts | Data policy highlight | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Google AI Studio | No card or billing account; Gemini models; per-project quotas reset midnight Pacific | Free prompts train Google products | Model breadth, prototyping |
| Groq | 14,400 RPD on Llama 3.1 8B; 70K TPM on Compound models | No default retention; ZDR available | High-frequency short prompts |
| OpenRouter | 50 free requests/day; 25+ free models; BYOK supported | Varies by upstream provider | Testing many models |
| GitHub Models | 15 RPM / 150 RPD (low tier); 8,000 input + 4,000 output tokens | Microsoft data terms | Quick experiments with a PAT |
| Cloudflare Workers AI | 10,000 Neurons/day (~280K output tokens on Llama 3.1 8B Fast) | Explicit no-training commitment | Privacy-sensitive work |
| Cohere | 20 req/min; 1,000 calls/month | Evaluation licence | Embeddings, reranking trials |
| NVIDIA NIM | 1,000 signup credits; up to 5,000 with business email | Free endpoint usage is logged | One-off model testing |
| Hugging Face | $0.10/month across 200+ models | Allocation subject to change | Demo-scale inference |
| Mistral | Free API-key mode; limits in Admin Panel | Zero-retention option mentioned | European-hosted models |
Nine providers issue keys without a credit card. Seven provide recurring free tiers, while NVIDIA and Hugging Face provide consumable credits that do not refresh. The spread is dramatic: GitHub Models gives you 8 DeepSeek-R1 requests per day, while Groq hands out 14,400 daily requests on Llama 3.1 8B.
Google AI Studio: the default free tier
Google AI Studio is the natural starting point for anyone who wants free access to frontier-tier models without entering billing information. No credit card or billing account is required — you sign in with a Google account, generate an API key, and start calling.
The free tier includes access to the Gemini model family: Gemini 3.6 Flash, 3.5 Flash, 2.5 Pro, and others. Text and embedding endpoints are included; quotas are set per project and reset at midnight Pacific time.
Your quota is only visible after you sign up
Google does not publish a single "free tier" rate-limit card the way Groq or OpenRouter does. Your actual limits — requests per minute, tokens per minute, tokens per day — appear only inside the AI Studio console after you create a project. This makes it hard to plan capacity in advance; the practical advice is to create a project, check the Quotas page, and design around whatever ceiling you see.
Your prompts train Google's products on the free tier
This is the single biggest caveat. Google's free-tier terms state that your prompts and generated content may be used to improve Google products. If you are working with sensitive, proprietary, or personal data, this disqualifies the free tier for your use case. Paid Gemini API usage (through Google Cloud with a billing account) does not carry this training clause, but that requires a credit card.
Free-tier image generation through Gemini is also unavailable; the free scope covers text and embeddings only.
Groq: exact daily caps
Groq's free tier is the most generous for high-frequency, short-prompt workloads. The limits are published explicitly in the Groq documentation and apply per organisation, not per user. Cached tokens do not count toward rate limits.
| Model | RPM | RPD | TPM | TPD |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Llama 3.1 8B Instant | 30 | 14,400 | 6,000 | 500,000 |
| Llama 3.3 70B Versatile | 30 | 1,000 | 12,000 | 100,000 |
| GPT-OSS-120B | 30 | 1,000 | 8,000 | 200,000 |
| GPT-OSS-20B | 30 | 1,000 | 8,000 | 200,000 |
| Qwen 3.6-27B | 30 | 1,000 | 8,000 | 200,000 |
| Groq Compound | 30 | 250 | 70,000 | — |
| Groq Compound Mini | 30 | 250 | 70,000 | — |
| Whisper Large V3 | 20 | 2,000 | — | 28,800 audio sec/day |
The standout is Llama 3.1 8B at 14,400 requests per day — enough for serious prototyping or a low-traffic production endpoint. The Compound models offer the highest per-minute token allowance at 70,000 TPM, though their daily request ceiling is tighter at 250 RPD.
Groq does not retain inference data by default and offers a Zero Data Retention (ZDR) option, which makes it one of the stronger privacy choices among free providers. The main limitation is that token-per-minute caps on the 8B model (6,000 TPM) can throttle long-context or high-volume generation.
OpenRouter: 50 free requests/day
OpenRouter is an API gateway rather than a model host. Its free tier lets you call a rotating pool of models that OpenRouter subsidises, accessed by appending :free to a model name or by using the openrouter/free auto-router.
Rate limits: Free models are capped at 20 RPM and 50 requests per day. A one-time $10 credit purchase raises the permanent daily free-model cap to 1,000 requests. These limits sit on top of any upstream provider throttling.
Free model catalogue: As of August 2026, OpenRouter lists 25+ free models — up from 15 in July — spanning text generation, embeddings, and reranking. The lineup includes models from NVIDIA (Nemotron 3 Ultra, Super, and Nano families with up to 1M-token context), Google (Gemma 4), Cohere (North Mini Code), OpenAI (gpt-oss-20b), and several others. The catalogue shifts frequently as providers add or withdraw free endpoints.
BYOK (Bring Your Own Key): OpenRouter supports BYOK for 60+ inference providers. When you supply your own provider API keys, the underlying provider bills the inference cost directly, and OpenRouter charges only its routing layer. The free BYOK allowance is now plan-dependent and measured by list-price inference cost rather than a flat request count — check the OpenRouter pricing page for current terms.
The main practical note: "free" on OpenRouter means no token charge, not necessarily no data retention. Upstream providers set their own data policies, and some (including NVIDIA and Poolside) explicitly log free-endpoint usage or may use prompts for training. Configure privacy filters per provider if needed.
Six more free tiers
GitHub Models
GitHub Models provides a playground and API endpoint for popular models using a GitHub Personal Access Token (PAT). The low tier offers 15 RPM and 150 RPD; the high tier drops to 10 RPM and 50 RPD. Each request is capped at 8,000 input tokens and 4,000 output tokens. DeepSeek-R1 is available but limited to 8 requests per day.
GitHub Models is convenient for quick experiments because the PAT-based auth requires no separate signup, but the tight token and request caps make it unsuitable for anything beyond prototyping.
Cloudflare Workers AI
Cloudflare's Workers AI gives every account 10,000 Neurons per day, resetting at 00:00 UTC. On Llama 3.1 8B Fast, that translates to roughly 280,000 output tokens per day. Cloudflare also hosts FLUX for free image generation — the main no-credit-card image option in this list.
The privacy stance is the strongest of any provider here: Cloudflare makes an explicit commitment not to use customer prompts or outputs for training or service improvement without consent. This makes Workers AI the top recommendation for sensitive-data workloads.
The Neurons abstraction is less intuitive than raw request or token counts — you need to check the Workers AI dashboard to see how many Neurons a given model consumes per token.
Cohere, NVIDIA, Hugging Face, Mistral
Cohere offers 20 requests per minute and 1,000 API calls per month on its free tier. The limit is suited for evaluation and testing rather than operational volume. Cohere's Command models and embeddings endpoints are included.
NVIDIA NIM provides 1,000 signup credits (up to 5,000 with a business email). These are one-off consumable credits, not a recurring monthly allowance, and there is no published credit-to-request conversion rate. NVIDIA's free models on OpenRouter come with a warning: free-endpoint usage is logged, and the company advises against submitting confidential or personal data.
Hugging Face offers approximately $0.10 per month in free inference credits across 200+ models through its Serverless Inference API. The allocation is explicitly marked as subject to change. This is demo-scale only — enough to try a model, not to build on.
Mistral has a free API-key mode with limits visible only inside the Admin Panel. The zero-retention option is mentioned in Mistral's documentation but is not presented as a clear default free-tier policy, making it harder to assess for privacy-sensitive use.
Beyond text: image, speech, embeddings
Two providers cover modalities beyond text:
- Cloudflare Workers AI hosts FLUX for image generation at no cost — the only no-credit-card option in this list. Gemini's image models are not available on the free tier.
- Groq Whisper provides speech-to-text with 2,000 requests per day and 28,800 audio seconds per day on the free plan.
OpenRouter's free catalogue has also expanded to include embeddings and reranking models from NVIDIA, adding retrieval and RAG capabilities to the free tier.
If the data matters, your shortlist shrinks to two
For work involving sensitive, proprietary, or regulated data, most providers on this list are disqualified:
- Google AI Studio uses free-tier prompts to train its products.
- NVIDIA logs free-endpoint usage and warns against submitting confidential data.
- OpenRouter free models inherit whatever data policy the upstream provider sets — some (Poolside, Liquid) explicitly train on free prompts.
- Hugging Face and Mistral have opaque or changeable retention terms.
That leaves two providers with clear, explicit privacy commitments:
- Cloudflare Workers AI — explicit no-training, no-service-improvement commitment without consent.
- Groq — no default inference retention; Zero Data Retention option available.
If your workload is privacy-sensitive and low-to-moderate volume, Cloudflare is the safer choice. If you need higher throughput and can work within Groq's token-per-minute caps, Groq with ZDR is the alternative.
When the free tier stops being enough
Every free tier on this list will eventually throttle you. The question is what to do when that happens.
The recommended approach is metered paid usage on a single provider, not provider-hopping across free tiers. Jumping between providers to dodge rate limits creates operational complexity — different SDKs, different data policies, different failure modes — that usually costs more in engineering time than the API savings.
Four of the providers listed above support OpenAI-compatible endpoints: Groq, OpenRouter, Cloudflare Workers AI, and Google AI Studio (via the OpenAI-compatible wrapper). This means you can switch from free to paid on any of them by updating a base URL and API key, without rewriting application code.
The practical graduation path: start free on Google AI Studio for model breadth or Groq for throughput. When you consistently hit daily caps, add a billing account to the same provider and switch to metered pricing. Reserve OpenRouter for multi-model testing, and use Cloudflare when data privacy is non-negotiable.
FAQ
Which free AI API requires no credit card? All nine providers listed above issue API keys without a credit card: Google AI Studio, Groq, OpenRouter, GitHub Models, Cloudflare Workers AI, Cohere, NVIDIA, Hugging Face, and Mistral.
Which free API has the highest daily request limit? Groq offers 14,400 requests per day on Llama 3.1 8B Instant — the highest recurring free-tier request count among providers listed here.
Is OpenRouter actually free? OpenRouter's :free model variants cost nothing per token, but are capped at 50 requests per day (1,000 after a $10 credit purchase). BYOK mode lets you route through your own provider keys with a plan-dependent free allowance. Neither is truly unlimited.
Can I use a free AI API in production? Yes, within the rate limits. Groq and Cloudflare are the most production-ready free tiers for their respective strengths (throughput and privacy). Once free caps routinely interrupt your workload, switch to the same provider's paid tier.
Which free API is best for privacy-sensitive data? Cloudflare Workers AI and Groq are the only providers with explicit non-training, non-retention commitments on their free tiers. All others either train on free prompts (Google), log usage (NVIDIA), or have provider-dependent policies (OpenRouter).