Free tiers that allow commercial/production use (commercial_ok: true). Eval-only tiers (Cohere trial keys, NVIDIA NIM, GitHub Models) are deliberately excluded — read their rows in the main list for the restriction.
20 of 51 tracked providers match.
| Provider | Type | What's free | The catch | Verified |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Google Gemini API (AI Studio) no cardno phonecommercial OKOpenAI-compat | Ongoing | Gemini 2.5 Flash, 2.5 Flash-Lite, 2.5 Pro (limited), embeddings, TTS models | Free-tier prompts/outputs may be used by Google to improve its products when used outside the UK/CH/EEA/EU | 2026-07-11 |
| Groq no cardphonecommercial OKOpenAI-compat | Ongoing | Open-weight models (Llama, Qwen, GPT-OSS) plus Whisper, no credit card required | Limits apply at the organization level, not per API key. Phone verification required at signup | 2026-07-11 |
| OpenRouter no cardno phonecommercial OKOpenAI-compat | Ongoing | 20+ models with a :free suffix, single API across many providers | ToS (Apr 2026) prohibits resale or building a competing service on the free models; a private proxy for personal use is fine | 2026-07-11 |
| Cloudflare Workers AI no cardno phonecommercial OKOpenAI-compat | Ongoing | 10,000 Neurons/day, all account plans | Resets daily at 00:00 UTC; overage on a Workers Paid plan bills at $0.011/1,000 Neurons | 2026-07-11 |
| Z.ai (Zhipu AI / GLM) no phonecommercial OKOpenAI-compat | Ongoing | GLM-4.5-Flash, GLM-4.7-Flash (text), and GLM-4.6V-Flash (vision) are officially listed as $0 cost (input, cached input, and output) on a permanent basis | Terms of Use prohibit using the service to "develop, train, or improve" competing algorithms or models — otherwise general use, including commercial, isn't restricted | 2026-07-30 |
| Nebius AI Studio cardno phonecommercial OKOpenAI-compat | Trial | $1 trial credit, valid for 30 days | Product renamed to "Nebius Token Factory"; a bank card is required to set up billing | 2026-07-30 |
| NLP Cloud cardno phonecommercial OK | Trial | $15 trial credit | Corrected: the official registration page does not ask for a phone number, contradicting the earlier listing | 2026-07-30 |
| SambaNova Cloud no cardcommercial OKOpenAI-compat | Ongoing | Rate-limited free tier (applies when no payment method is linked) across all models | Free Tier applies when no payment method is linked to the account; SambaCloud ToS grants a commercial license (no evaluation-only clause). The previously-listed "$5 / 3 months" trial could not be re-confirmed on official pages (2026-07-30). | 2026-07-30 |
| Jina AI no cardno phonecommercial OKOpenAI-compat | Trial | 10M free tokens (one-time) across all models — embeddings (v3/v4), rerankers, classifier; plus a keyless Reader (r.jina.ai) for basic use | The 10M-token balance is a one-time grant that does not replenish; the keyless Reader is genuinely ongoing. Hosted API is commercial-OK and data is not used for training. No card required. | 2026-07-30 |
| Deepgram no cardno phonecommercial OK | Trial | $200 free credit on signup (no card, no expiration) — Nova speech-to-text and Aura text-to-speech at pay-as-you-go rates | No card and no expiration on the credit. Data catch: the Model Improvement Program is opt-OUT — send mip_opt_out=true per request to keep your data out of training. Native REST/WebSocket API, not OpenAI-compatible. | 2026-07-30 |
| AssemblyAI no cardno phonecommercial OKOpenAI-compat | Trial | $50 free credit on signup (no card) — pre-recorded & streaming speech-to-text, Speech Understanding, and an OpenAI-compatible LLM Gateway (25+ models) | One-time credit, not renewing. Catch: the default model differs between free and paid accounts — set speech_models explicitly to avoid cost jumps on upgrade. Only the LLM Gateway is OpenAI-compatible. | 2026-07-30 |
| Mixedbread no cardno phonecommercial OK | Trial | Starter plan: $5 one-time credit (no card) — embeddings (mxbai-embed-large-v1), reranking, and multimodal search over PDF/image/doc/code | Free credit is usage-based and non-renewing; usage-based pricing applies afterward. Native REST API, not documented as OpenAI-compatible. No card required. | 2026-07-30 |
| Ollama Cloud no cardno phonecommercial OKOpenAI-compat | Ongoing | $0 Free plan: access to cloud-hosted open models (Qwen, GPT-OSS, DeepSeek, etc.) via API | First-party — Ollama hosts the cloud models. Requires an ollama.com account + API key (`ollama signin`); the free plan is for light usage, Pro ($20/mo) raises limits. No card required. | 2026-07-30 |
| Runware no cardno phonecommercial OK | Trial | $2 in signup credits across first-party image models (FLUX.1/FLUX.2, Stable Diffusion 3, SDXL) on the Sonic Inference Engine — hundreds to thousands of generations | The $2 requires signup with a business email (personal/free-mail domains may be rejected); one-time, non-renewing. No watermark, no card, commercial use allowed. The OpenAI-compatible endpoint is chat-only, not for images. | 2026-07-30 |
| OCR.space no cardno phonecommercial OK | Ongoing | 25,000 conversions/month (Engine 1 & 2) plus 2,500 Engine 3 conversions/month; max 1 MB file, PDFs up to 3 pages | Free searchable-PDF output carries a watermark (raw text extraction is unrestricted); the free key needs only an email, no card. Commercial use permitted. | 2026-07-30 |
| LlamaParse (LlamaCloud) no cardno phonecommercial OK | Ongoing | Free plan: 10,000 credits/month (~10,000 pages in balanced parse mode at 1 credit/page) | Credit-based (1,000 credits = $1.25); premium parse modes consume more credits per page. No card required. Document parsing for RAG (LlamaIndex). | 2026-07-30 |
| Nanonets no cardno phonecommercial OK | Trial | $50 in free credits on signup (one-time) across data-extraction / OCR workflows | One-time signup credit, not renewing; no credit card required to start. Paid plans start at $100/month afterwards. | 2026-07-30 |
| Speechify API no cardno phonecommercial OK | Ongoing | 50,000 characters/month TTS (hard cap) + 60 min/month voice agents | Commercial use is allowed on the free tier. No credit card required. Hard monthly cap that pauses at the limit. | 2026-07-30 |
| Hume AI (Octave TTS) no cardcommercial OK | Ongoing | 10,000 characters/month TTS (~10 minutes) on the Free plan | The free plan includes a commercial license; overage billed at $0.15/1,000 chars. No card stated as required to start. Not OpenAI-compatible. | 2026-07-30 |
| Unreal Speech commercial OK | Ongoing | 250,000 characters/month TTS (~6 hours of audio) | Commercial use allowed, but free-plan users must attribute Unreal Speech with a link when publishing audio. First-party REST endpoints. Card requirement not stated. | 2026-07-30 |