Embeddings power semantic search, RAG and clustering — and you rarely need to pay for them at prototype scale. The providers below expose embedding models on a free tier, several with generous monthly token allowances.
Building RAG? Pair one of these with a free chat model (see the model index), ideally behind the same OpenAI-compatible base URL.
Top pick — Jina AI
Free embeddings & rerank behind an OpenAI-compatible endpoint Details →
11 verified providers
| Provider | Free tier | Rate limits | Gotchas |
|---|---|---|---|
| Google Gemini API (AI Studio) | Gemini 2.5 Flash, 2.5 Flash-Lite, 2.5 Pro (limited), embeddings, TTS models | Varies by model, roughly 5-30 req/min and 20-500 req/day depending on model | no cardno phonecommercial OKOpenAI-compatible |
| Cloudflare Workers AI | 10,000 Neurons/day, all account plans | 30+ models: LLMs (Llama, Mistral, DeepSeek, Qwen...), embeddings, image, audio | no cardno phonecommercial OKOpenAI-compatible |
| Cohere | Trial (evaluation) API keys covering chat, embed and rerank | 1,000 API calls/month total; 20 req/min chat; 2,000 inputs/min embed; 10 req/min rerank | no cardno phoneeval onlyOpenAI-compatible |
| HuggingFace | Free CPU Basic + ZeroGPU for Spaces; Inference Providers has a monthly credit ($0.10/mo on Free plan, $2.00/mo on PRO/Team/Enterprise) | No RPM/TPM published, only credit amounts | no cardOpenAI-compatible |
| SiliconFlow | Several models permanently free (e.g. Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct and others) at $0 cost, plus a $1 welcome credit for paid models | Fixed per-model limits for free models; generic docs cite ranges of 1,000-10,000 RPM and 50,000-5,000,000 TPM depending on model tier — exact limits shown in-account | phone requiredOpenAI-compatible |
| Jina AI | 10M free tokens (one-time) across all models — embeddings (v3/v4), rerankers, classifier; plus a keyless Reader (r.jina.ai) for basic use | Free key: 100 RPM / 100k TPM for embeddings & reranker (2 concurrent); keyless Reader 20 RPM | no cardno phonecommercial OKOpenAI-compatible |
| Mixedbread | Starter plan: $5 one-time credit (no card) — embeddings (mxbai-embed-large-v1), reranking, and multimodal search over PDF/image/doc/code | Starter plan: 100 requests/min | no cardno phonecommercial OK |
| Clarifai | One-time $5 credit across serverless models (GPT-OSS-120B, Claude, Llama), vision, embeddings and image generation | 15 requests/second global default (CONN_THROTTLED on exceed) | no cardphone requiredOpenAI-compatible |
| Pinecone Inference | Starter (free) plan: 5M tokens/mo for embedding models (llama-text-embed-v2, multilingual-e5-large) and 500 requests/mo for the bge-reranker-v2-m3 rerank model | 5M embedding tokens/mo; 500 rerank requests/mo on Starter | no card |
| Twelve Labs (Marengo Embed) | Free plan: the Marengo Embed API for all input types (video, audio, image, text) at no cost, plus ~600 min indexing | Embed video/audio: 3,000 RPD, 25 RPM; embed text/image: 3,000 RPD, 600 RPM | no card |
| Tencent Hunyuan | 1,000,000 free tokens for Hunyuan text LLMs (hunyuan-a13b, turbos, translation & vision models), plus a separate 1,000,000-token allotment for hunyuan-embedding | Not published; bounded by the token package | OpenAI-compatible |
FAQ
Is there a free embeddings API?
Yes — providers such as Jina AI, Cohere, Google Gemini and Cloudflare offer embedding models on a free tier, several with large monthly token allowances.
Can I build RAG for free?
For prototypes, yes: pair a free embeddings API with a free chat model, ideally behind the same OpenAI-compatible base URL.