Every Free AI API in 2026: The Complete Guide to Zero-Cost Inference

You do not need to spend a dollar to run frontier AI models. That is not a pitch or a caveat-laden promise. In 2026, multiple providers offer genuinely free API access to models that would have cost hundreds of dollars per month just two years ago. Llama 3.3 70B, Gemini 2.5 Pro, Mixtral, DeepSeek R1 - all available at zero cost if you know where to look.

This guide is the reference we wish existed when we started building. We have tested every provider listed here, verified the limits, and organized them into tiers so you can pick the right one for your use case in minutes rather than hours.

How Free AI Inference Works

Most free inference falls into three categories. API-based free tiers give you an API key and let you call models programmatically - these are what developers actually want. Chat-only free access gives you a web interface but no API. Trial credits give you a small budget that eventually runs out.

The important distinctions are rate limits (requests per minute), token quotas (daily or monthly caps), and whether you need a credit card on file. A "free tier" that requires your card and auto-charges after a threshold is not the same as one that simply stops working when you hit the limit.

Every provider below has been verified as of February 2026. Limits change frequently, so treat the specific numbers as approximate and check the provider's docs for the latest.

The Complete Comparison

Tier 1: Truly Free - No Credit Card, No Expiry

These providers offer genuine free API access with no credit card requirement and no expiration date. You sign up, get a key, and start building.

Google AI Studio

Google AI Studio is the single best free AI API available today. Full stop. You get access to Gemini 2.5 Pro, 2.5 Flash, and 2.5 Flash-Lite - models that compete with anything on the market. Google reduced free tier quotas in December 2025, but the offering remains the most generous by total token volume.

The API is OpenAI-compatible, so you can point most existing tooling at it by changing the base URL and key. Multimodal support is included: send images, audio, and video alongside text. The 1 million token context window on Gemini 2.5 Pro means you can process entire codebases or documents in a single call.

Best for: Prototyping, building apps, anything that benefits from long context or multimodal input.

Limits: Gemini 2.5 Pro at 5 RPM / 100 requests per day, Flash at 10 RPM / 250 per day, Flash-Lite at 15 RPM / 1,000 per day. All models share a 250K tokens-per-minute cap. Production use requires a paid plan.

Get started: Visit ai.google.dev, sign in with a Google account, and generate an API key. No credit card required.

Groq

Groq's selling point is speed. Their custom LPU hardware delivers inference at 300+ tokens per second, fast enough that latency essentially disappears. The free tier gives you access to Llama 3.3 70B, Llama 4 Scout, Qwen3 32B, Kimi K2, and several other open-source models.

The rate limits are reasonable for development: 30 requests per minute on most models (60 RPM on smaller ones like Qwen3 32B). The daily request cap is 1,000 on the larger 70B models and 14,400 on the 8B models, so plan your model choice accordingly.

Best for: Speed-sensitive applications, interactive tools, real-time AI features.

Limits: 30 RPM, 12K tokens/min on 70B models, 1K requests/day (70B) or 14.4K (8B). Rate limits apply at the organization level.

Get started: Sign up at console.groq.com. API key generation is instant. OpenAI-compatible endpoint.

OpenRouter

OpenRouter is a unified API gateway that routes to dozens of providers. The free tier is community-funded: users with paid accounts subsidize a pool of free credits that anyone can use. This means you get access to free variants of models from Meta, Google, Mistral, and others.

The model variety is unmatched. Free models include DeepSeek R1 and V3, Llama 4 Maverick and Scout, Qwen3 235B, and others. You can also use the openrouter/free router to auto-select among available free models.

Best for: Trying many models through one API, comparing outputs, building model-agnostic applications.

Limits: 20 RPM on free models, 50 requests per day without a paid balance (increased to 1,000/day if you have $10+ account balance). Free models are marked with a :free suffix in the model list.

Get started: Create an account at openrouter.ai. The API follows the OpenAI chat completions format exactly.

Mistral AI

Mistral offers a free "Experiment" tier on their La Plateforme API that includes access to all Mistral models: Large, Small, Codestral, Pixtral 12B, and even their embedding and OCR models. The rate limits on the free tier are restrictive at 2 requests per minute, but you get 1 billion tokens per month, and the model quality is excellent. Codestral is a genuine standout for code generation tasks.

Le Chat, Mistral's web interface, is free for personal use and provides access to the same models. If you only need occasional inference, Le Chat may be more practical than the API rate limits suggest.

Best for: Code generation (Codestral), European data residency requirements, access to the full Mistral model suite.

Limits: 2 RPM, 500K TPM, 1B tokens/month on the Experiment tier. Le Chat has separate, more generous limits.

Get started: Sign up at console.mistral.ai. Le Chat is available at chat.mistral.ai.

Cerebras

Cerebras runs inference on their wafer-scale engine, which they claim delivers 20x faster throughput than NVIDIA GPUs. The free tier includes Llama 3.3 70B, Qwen3 32B, Qwen3 235B, and OpenAI's open-source GPT-OSS 120B - with 30 requests per minute and 1 million tokens per day.

The speed makes Cerebras especially interesting for agentic workflows where you need many sequential LLM calls. When each call returns in under a second, the total wall-clock time for a multi-step agent run drops dramatically.

Best for: Speed-critical applications, agentic workflows with many LLM calls, rapid iteration during development.

Limits: 30 RPM, 60K TPM, 1M tokens/day. No waitlist, no credit card.

Get started: Sign up at cloud.cerebras.ai. OpenAI-compatible API.

Cohere

Cohere's free tier targets developers building with retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). The Command R+ model is one of the better options for grounded, citation-backed responses, and the free tier includes access to their Embed 4 model for vector embeddings and Rerank 3.5 - a combination that covers the full RAG pipeline.

The free tier allows 20 API calls per minute and 1,000 per month for personal and prototyping use. The monthly cap is the real constraint here, but it is enough to build a proof of concept.

Best for: RAG applications, search and retrieval, projects that need both generation and embedding from one provider.

Limits: 20 RPM, 1K requests/month. Free tier is restricted to non-commercial use.

Get started: Sign up at dashboard.cohere.com. Trial keys are generated instantly.

Cloudflare Workers AI

Cloudflare takes a different approach: AI inference runs at the edge on their global network, and the free tier is bundled with Workers (their serverless platform). You get 10,000 neurons per day for free. That is Cloudflare's unit of compute that roughly maps to tokens processed.

The model catalog includes Llama 3.2 variants, Mistral 7B, FLUX.2 for image generation, and Whisper for speech-to-text. The edge deployment means low latency for users worldwide, which matters for user-facing applications.

Best for: Serverless deployments, applications that need low global latency, combining AI with edge compute logic.

Limits: 10K neurons/day on the free tier. Models are quantized for edge deployment, so quality may differ slightly from full-precision versions.

Get started: Create a Cloudflare account, enable Workers AI in the dashboard. Free tier is automatic.

GitHub Models

GitHub Models gives you playground and API access to a curated selection of high-quality models including GPT-4o, GPT-4.1, o3, xAI Grok-3, DeepSeek-R1, and others. It is aimed squarely at developers who want to experiment with models before integrating them.

Rate limits are tight: the model catalog is split into tiers. High-tier models (GPT-4o, o1) get 10 RPM and 50 requests per day. Low-tier models get 15 RPM and 150 per day. The model quality is high and the playground interface is excellent for quick testing.

Best for: Quick model evaluation, playground experimentation, developers already in the GitHub ecosystem.

Limits: 10-15 RPM, 50-150 requests/day depending on model tier. 8K input / 4K output tokens per request.

Get started: Visit github.com/marketplace/models. Available to all GitHub users.

NVIDIA NIM

NVIDIA's NIM (NVIDIA Inference Microservices) offers 1,000 free API credits when you sign up, with the option to request an additional 4,000. The model catalog is impressive: DeepSeek R1 and V3.1, Llama variants, Kimi K2.5, AI21 Jamba, and various domain-specific models.

The credits eventually run out, but they cover a meaningful amount of testing. NVIDIA also provides Docker containers for self-hosted deployment if you have your own GPU hardware, free for NVIDIA Developer Program members.

Best for: Testing frontier models, enterprise evaluation, self-hosted deployment planning.

Limits: 1,000 credits on signup (can request up to 5,000 total). 40 RPM.

Get started: Sign up at build.nvidia.com. Credits are applied automatically.

HuggingFace Inference API

HuggingFace's free Inference API lets you call thousands of community-hosted models. The catch is that free-tier models are loaded on-demand, which means cold starts can take 30+ seconds. Popular models stay warm, but niche ones may time out.

The real value here is access to the long tail. Need a specialized sentiment model? A fine-tuned summarizer for medical text? A translation model for an uncommon language pair? HuggingFace probably has it, and the Inference API lets you call it without any infrastructure.

Best for: Specialized models, experimentation across thousands of model options, academic research.

Limits: Rate-limited, cold starts on unpopular models, limited to models under ~10B parameters on free tier.

Get started: Sign up at huggingface.co and generate an API token. Most models have a "Use this model" API snippet.

OpenCode

OpenCode is a free, open-source terminal-based coding assistant that connects to multiple AI providers. It supports Claude, GPT, Gemini, and local models through a unified CLI interface. The tool itself is free; you bring your own API keys from whichever provider you choose.

Combined with the free tiers listed above, especially Google AI Studio or Groq, OpenCode gives you a capable coding assistant at zero cost. It supports file editing, terminal commands, and multi-turn conversations.

Best for: Developers who want a free Claude Code alternative, terminal-based coding workflows.

Limits: Depends on the underlying provider you connect to.

Get started: Install via your package manager or from github.com/opencode-ai/opencode.

Tier 2: Free Credits and Trial Accounts

These providers give you a spending budget that eventually runs out. Still useful, especially if you need access to specific models.

xAI

xAI offers $25 in free API credits on signup, among the most generous trial budgets on this list. This gives you access to Grok 4 and Grok 4.1 Fast, which perform well on reasoning and coding tasks. Grok 4.1 Fast features a 2 million token context window, one of the longest available anywhere.

Limits: $25 one-time signup credits. Additional $150/month available if you opt into data sharing (requires $5 prior spend). No credit card required to start.

Get started: Sign up at console.x.ai.

DeepSeek

DeepSeek gives you 5 million free tokens on signup (valid for 30 days), and after that is so cheap it functions as quasi-free for development. DeepSeek V3 pricing is around $0.14 per million input tokens and $0.28 per million output tokens, roughly 20-100x cheaper than OpenAI or Anthropic. A few dollars of credit can last months of active development.

DeepSeek R1, their reasoning model, comes in at $0.55/$2.19 per million tokens and competes with much more expensive alternatives. The API is OpenAI-compatible and has no hard rate limit: the platform tries to serve every request.

Limits: 5M free tokens on signup, then pay-per-use at extremely low prices. No credit card required. Occasional capacity issues during peak demand.

Get started: Sign up at platform.deepseek.com.

SambaNova

SambaNova offers a genuinely persistent free tier, not just credits, with access to Llama 3.3 70B, Llama 3.1 (up to 405B), Qwen 2.5 72B, and other models on their custom RDU hardware. You also get $5 in initial credits (valid 30 days) on top of the free tier. Speed is the selling point.

Limits: 10-30 RPM depending on model size (Llama 3.1 405B at 10 RPM, 8B models at 30 RPM). Free tier persists indefinitely beyond the credits.

Get started: Sign up at cloud.sambanova.ai.

Fireworks AI

Fireworks offers free API access at 10 RPM without a payment method, enough for light prototyping. Adding a payment method unlocks up to 6,000 RPM. They specialize in fast, optimized inference for open-source models including Llama 3.1 405B, DeepSeek R1, and hundreds of others.

Limits: 10 RPM without payment method, 6,000 RPM with one. Competitive pricing on open-source models.

Get started: Sign up at fireworks.ai.

Together AI

Together AI does not offer a free tier: they require a minimum $5 credit purchase to get started. However, they occasionally run signup promotions, and their Startup Accelerator program offers up to $50K in free credits. The model catalog includes Llama 4 Scout, DeepSeek R1, and many other open-source models with competitive pricing.

Limits: No free tier. $5 minimum credit purchase. Dynamic rate limits based on tier.

Get started: Sign up at api.together.ai. Credit card required.

AI21 Labs

AI21 offers $10 in trial credits valid for 3 months, covering their Jamba Large and Jamba Mini models. These are based on a hybrid Mamba-Transformer architecture that is competitive on long-context tasks and offers a different approach from standard transformer-only options. Rate limits are generous at 200 RPM during the trial.

Limits: $10 trial credits, valid 3 months. 200 RPM, 10 RPS. Billing required after trial expires.

Get started: Sign up at studio.ai21.com.

Anthropic

Anthropic offers $5 in free API credits for new accounts. That gets you a meaningful amount of Claude Sonnet usage or a smaller amount of Opus. The API is well-documented and the models are among the best available, making it worth the signup even if the credits run out quickly.

Limits: $5 one-time credits. Credit card required for continued use. Not a recurring free tier.

Get started: Sign up at console.anthropic.com.

Tier 3: Free Chat-Only Access

These services offer free web chat interfaces but no API access. Useful for manual tasks, not for building applications.

ChatGPT Free gives you GPT-5.2 with ads and daily message limits. Good enough for casual use but the rate limits tighten during peak hours.

Claude Free provides Claude Sonnet with a daily message cap. Strong for writing, analysis, and careful reasoning tasks.

Gemini Free offers Gemini 3 Pro with deep Google Workspace integration, arguably the most capable free chat experience.

Microsoft Copilot includes GPT-5.2 access plus free DALL-E image generation, a unique perk.

Perplexity Free focuses on search-augmented responses with citations. Limited daily queries but excellent for research.

If you just need occasional AI assistance and do not need to integrate it into code, these chat interfaces are genuinely good. But for developers building applications, API access is what matters, and the providers in Tiers 1 and 2 are where you should focus.

Best Picks by Use Case

Best for prototyping and building apps: Google AI Studio. The combination of model quality, generous limits, multimodal support, and 1M token context makes it the default recommendation for most developers.

Best for speed-critical applications: Groq or Cerebras. Both deliver inference at thousands of tokens per second. Groq has slightly better model variety; Cerebras has a simpler free tier.

Best for model variety and comparison: OpenRouter. One API key, dozens of models. Ideal for A/B testing models or building applications that let users choose their preferred model.

Best for coding tasks: GitHub Models for quick testing, or Google AI Studio plus OpenCode for a full free coding assistant setup. Mistral's Codestral is also worth evaluating for code-specific tasks.

Best for RAG and search applications: Cohere. The combination of Command R+ for generation, Embed 4 for embeddings, and Rerank 3.5 covers the full pipeline.

Best for production-like testing: Mistral or Cohere. Both offer free tiers that mirror their production APIs, so your code will not need changes when you upgrade.

Getting Started: Your First Free API Call

Here is a working Python example using Google AI Studio. Copy, paste, run:

import requests
import json

API_KEY = "your-api-key-here"  # Get one at ai.google.dev
URL = f"https://generativelanguage.googleapis.com/v1beta/models/gemini-2.5-flash:generateContent?key={API_KEY}"

response = requests.post(URL, json={
    "contents": [{"parts": [{"text": "Explain quantum computing in one paragraph."}]}]
})

print(json.loads(response.text)["candidates"][0]["content"]["parts"][0]["text"])

Or using OpenRouter with the OpenAI-compatible format:

from openai import OpenAI

client = OpenAI(
    base_url="https://openrouter.ai/api/v1",
    api_key="your-openrouter-key",  # Get one at openrouter.ai
)

response = client.chat.completions.create(
    model="meta-llama/llama-3.3-70b-instruct:free",
    messages=[{"role": "user", "content": "Explain quantum computing in one paragraph."}],
)

print(response.choices[0].message.content)

Tips for staying within limits:

• Cache responses locally during development. Do not call the API for the same prompt twice.
• Use smaller models (8B, Mistral Small) for iteration and testing. Switch to larger models for final evaluation.
• Spread requests across multiple providers. Google AI Studio for your main workload, Groq for speed-sensitive calls, OpenRouter for model comparison.
• Monitor your usage. Most providers have dashboards showing remaining quota.

The Bottom Line

The free AI inference landscape in 2026 is remarkably capable. You can build, test, and even soft-launch AI-powered applications without spending a cent. Start with Google AI Studio for its unbeatable combination of model quality and generous limits. Add Groq or Cerebras when you need speed. Use OpenRouter when you want to test across models.

The paid tiers still matter for production workloads: you will need higher rate limits, SLAs, and dedicated support. But for prototyping, learning, side projects, and early-stage development, the free options are more than enough. Stop paying for inference you do not need.