Can you still run a real project on a free AI API in 2026? Yes: Groq alone gives you 14,400 free requests a day on an 8B Llama model. But caps differ by three orders of magnitude between providers, and Google no longer publishes its free-tier numbers at all. Every figure below comes from official provider docs, checked July 29, 2026.
Free AI API limits at a glance (verified July 29, 2026)
Nine providers issue API keys without a credit card. Seven are recurring free tiers; NVIDIA and Hugging Face give one-off credits that run out.
| Provider | Free tier (official numbers) | Credit card | Trains on your data (free tier) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Google Gemini API | Tokens free on flash/pro text models; per-model RPM/RPD shown only inside your AI Studio account | No | Yes ("Used to improve our products: Yes") |
| Groq | llama-3.1-8b: 30 RPM / 14,400 RPD; llama-3.3-70b: 30 RPM / 1,000 RPD / 100K TPD | No | No retention by default; ZDR available |
| OpenRouter | :free models: 20 RPM, 50 req/day — 1,000 req/day after a one-time $10 top-up | No (top-up optional) | Depends on upstream provider; opt-out toggle |
| GitHub Models | Low-tier models: 15 RPM / 150 RPD; DeepSeek-R1: 1 RPM / 8 RPD | No (PAT only) | Not stated in docs |
| Cloudflare Workers AI | 10,000 Neurons/day, resets 00:00 UTC | No | No (explicit commitment) |
| Cohere | Trial key: 20 req/min, 1,000 calls/month | No | Not stated on rate-limits page |
| Mistral | Free mode exists; limits shown only in your Admin Panel | No | Not stated; free zero-retention option announced |
| Hugging Face Inference Providers | $0.10/month in credits (marked "subject to change") | No | Per routed provider's policy |
| NVIDIA NIM | 1,000 credits on signup, up to 5,000 with a business email | No | Not stated |
Daily caps run from 8 requests (DeepSeek-R1 on GitHub Models) to 14,400 (Groq's 8B endpoint). Compare rows with care: requests, tokens, Neurons and dollar credits aren't the same unit.
Google AI Studio: the default free tier — with two catches
Google AI Studio remains the free tier most developers should start with: you get Gemini 3.6 Flash, Gemini 3.5 Flash, Gemini 2.5 Pro and eight other text models at zero cost, with no billing account required. Free-tier eligibility is "an active project or free trial"; the paid Tier 1 is what requires linking billing.
Your quota is only visible after you sign up
Google's rate-limits page no longer lists per-model request limits; it points you to your own project in AI Studio instead. Two rules do hold for everyone: quotas count per project rather than per API key, and daily counters reset at midnight Pacific time. Treat any specific RPM figure you find elsewhere as stale until your dashboard confirms it.
Your prompts train Google's products on the free tier
Every free-tier row on Google's pricing page is marked "Used to improve our products: Yes"; paid traffic is marked No. If you're sending customer data or anything under NDA, that line rules out the free tier no matter how large the quota. Image generation is also excluded, so free Gemini covers text and embeddings only.
Groq: exact daily caps, published in the open
Groq publishes its free-tier limits per model, no login required:
| Model | RPM | Requests/day | Tokens/day |
|---|---|---|---|
| llama-3.1-8b-instant | 30 | 14,400 | 500K |
| llama-3.3-70b-versatile | 30 | 1,000 | 100K |
| openai/gpt-oss-120b | 30 | 1,000 | 200K |
| whisper-large-v3 | 20 | 2,000 | 28,800 audio-sec |
The catch is tokens per minute: llama-3.3-70b caps at 12K TPM, so long-context work throttles even while the daily request count looks generous. On data, Groq doesn't retain inference inputs or outputs by default and offers Zero Data Retention on request.
For short prompts at high frequency — classification, extraction, webhook enrichment — Groq's 8B endpoint at 14,400 requests a day is the best free deal here, as long as an 8B model is enough and you stay under 6K tokens per minute.
OpenRouter: 50 free requests a day — 1,000 if you park $10
OpenRouter gives you whatever carries the :free suffix rather than one vendor's lineup. On July 29, 2026 that pool held 15 text models, including NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Ultra and Ling-3.0-flash.
The limits are account-wide across every free model: 20 requests per minute and 50 per day. Buying $10 of credits once raises the daily cap to 1,000 permanently, and that $10 stays spendable on paid models. OpenRouter's usable free tier effectively costs $10 once.
Free-model traffic routes to upstream providers under their policies, and the default doesn't block the ones that train on your inputs — privacy settings let you block them, toggled separately for free and paid models. On what the pool is actually good for, one developer in r/ChatGPTCoding:
"I recommend using the Openrouter API Key with the unlimited and not rate limited Deepseek/Deepseek R1 0528 - free model. It's intelligent, strong reasoning."
The pool turns over monthly; current coding picks go model by model.
Six more free tiers worth knowing
GitHub Models — a free playground with a real API
Any GitHub account gets API access with a personal access token alone: no card, no separate signup. Without a Copilot subscription you sit in the Copilot Free column: 15 RPM / 150 requests per day for low-tier models, 10 RPM / 50 RPD for high-tier ones, with requests capped at 8,000 input + 4,000 output tokens. Reasoning models are far tighter; DeepSeek-R1 allows 8 requests a day. GitHub states these limits can change without notice.
Cloudflare Workers AI — 10,000 Neurons a day, and a no-training guarantee
Cloudflare meters in Neurons: 10,000 per day, reset at 00:00 UTC, on both Free and Paid Workers plans. Per Cloudflare's conversion table that's roughly 280K output tokens a day on llama-3.1-8b-fast. It also states in writing that it won't use customer content to train models or improve services without consent — the strongest data commitment of the nine, and the reason to default here for privacy-sensitive work.
Cohere, NVIDIA, Hugging Face, Mistral — smaller or opaque
| Provider | Free allocation | The catch |
|---|---|---|
| Cohere | Trial key: 20 req/min | 1,000 calls/month total: evaluation, not operation |
| NVIDIA build.nvidia.com | 1,000 credits on signup; up to 5,000 with a business email | One-off credits, not a recurring tier, and no published credit-to-request rate |
| Hugging Face Inference Providers | $0.10/month in credits across 200+ models | Enough for demos only, and marked "subject to change" |
| Mistral | Free mode for API keys | Limits aren't published; they appear only in your Admin Panel |
Beyond text: image, speech and embeddings at $0
Free tiers are thinnest outside text. Image generation is the clearest example: Gemini's image models are marked "Not available" on the free tier, leaving Cloudflare's FLUX deployment (inside the same 10,000 daily Neurons) as the main no-card option. Speech-to-text is better served: Groq gives whisper-large-v3 its own free quota of 2,000 requests and 28,800 audio-seconds per day. For embeddings, both Gemini (gemini-embedding-001, free tier) and GitHub Models (15 RPM / 150 RPD) work without payment.
If the data matters, your shortlist shrinks to two
Cloudflare and Groq are the only two providers here that commit in writing to not training on or retaining free-tier inputs. Google states the opposite outright, and the remaining five say nothing on the pages where you'd look, which for real user data means unresolved rather than safe.
A shared or proxied key from a GitHub repo or Discord server doesn't belong on the shortlist at all: your traffic runs through a stranger's account, and access ends when that account does.
When the free tier stops being enough
You've outgrown free tiers when any of these becomes routine:
- A daily cap interrupts real work: Groq 70B's 100K tokens/day is one moderate batch job.
- You need a model class no free tier carries. Frontier reasoning models and image generation are both absent or restricted across the nine tiers above.
- You're spending engineering time rotating between providers to dodge caps.
Overflow is cheaper than it looks: metered flash-class models are priced per million tokens, so a day past Groq's free 100K costs cents on an aggregator like AIReiter. Groq, OpenRouter, Cloudflare and Gemini all expose OpenAI-compatible endpoints, so switching is usually a base-URL change.
| Your situation | Stay free or pay? |
|---|---|
| Prototype, no real user data | Free: Google AI Studio (breadth) or Groq (throughput) |
| Privacy-sensitive, low volume | Free: Cloudflare Workers AI (no-training guarantee) |
| Trying many models cheaply | OpenRouter: 50 req/day free; a one-time $10 purchase unlocks 1,000/day |
| Daily caps interrupting real work | Metered pay-as-you-go; free tiers as fallback |
FAQ
Is there a completely free AI API?
Yes. Google AI Studio, Groq, GitHub Models and Cloudflare Workers AI all provide working API access with no payment method on file, as of July 29, 2026. Each enforces daily or per-minute caps. Google's free tier additionally uses your prompts to improve its products.
Which AI API is free without a credit card?
All nine providers in the comparison table above issue keys without a card. What separates them is cap size and data policy: compare Groq's 14,400 requests/day against Cohere's 1,000 calls/month, or Cloudflare's no-training commitment against Google's opposite stance.
Which GPT API is free?
OpenAI's own API has no free tier, but OpenAI's open-weight gpt-oss models are free on three platforms: Groq (gpt-oss-120b at 1,000 requests/day), Cloudflare Workers AI (within 10,000 daily Neurons), and OpenRouter (openai/gpt-oss-20b:free). GitHub Models also exposes Azure-hosted OpenAI GPT models on its free tier, excluding the o-series and GPT-5 class.
What is the most generous free AI API tier?
Depends on the axis. By raw request count, Groq's llama-3.1-8b-instant at 14,400/day. By token volume, Cloudflare's 10,000 Neurons/day. By model quality at $0, Google AI Studio with Gemini 2.5 Pro included, though with training-data strings attached.