Some free tiers add phone verification on top of the signup form. The providers here ask for neither a credit card nor a phone number, so you can go from zero to a working key in a couple of minutes.
A few — like Pollinations and AI Horde — don't even need an account for basic use. The trade-off is predictable: the fewer the gates, the tighter the rate limits.
Top pick — Cloudflare Workers AI
Highest free daily volume for a real side project Details →
12 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 |
| OpenRouter | 20+ models with a :free suffix, single API across many providers | 20 req/min; 50 req/day under 10 credits purchased lifetime, 1000 req/day once 10+ credits purchased (one-time, not a subscription) | 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 |
| GitHub Models | Included with any GitHub account via the Copilot tier | Copilot Free: ~15 RPM / 150 RPD on "low" tier models, 8K input / 4K output tokens per request. Higher Copilot tiers raise the ceiling | no cardno phoneeval onlyOpenAI-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 |
| Ollama Cloud | $0 Free plan: access to cloud-hosted open models (Qwen, GPT-OSS, DeepSeek, etc.) via API | Session limits reset every 5 hours and weekly limits every 7 days; 1 concurrent cloud model on the free plan (exact token caps not published) | no cardno phonecommercial OKOpenAI-compatible |
| AI Horde | Free crowdsourced text & image generation; anonymous API key '0000000000' (no registration), or register to earn kudos for priority | Queue-based priority via kudos (no fixed quota); anonymous requests get lowest priority under load | no cardno phone |
| Pollinations.ai | Free hosted image models (Flux, Turbo, Stable Diffusion) via a simple GET URL; also text and audio. No signup required to start | Anonymous ~1 request / 15s; free registration (Seed tier) ~1 request / 5s | no cardno phone |
| OCR.space | 25,000 conversions/month (Engine 1 & 2) plus 2,500 Engine 3 conversions/month; max 1 MB file, PDFs up to 3 pages | 500 requests per day per IP address | no cardno phonecommercial OK |
| LlamaParse (LlamaCloud) | Free plan: 10,000 credits/month (~10,000 pages in balanced parse mode at 1 credit/page) | 5 concurrent jobs; 1 project; 5 indexes on the free plan | no cardno phonecommercial OK |
| Speechify API | 50,000 characters/month TTS (hard cap) + 60 min/month voice agents | 3 concurrent calls; hard cap pauses at the limit (no overages) | no cardno phonecommercial OK |
| ElevenLabs | 10,000 credits/month shared across Text-to-Speech, Speech-to-Text and more (~10 min TTS/month) | Concurrency tied to the Free plan (not numerically published) | no cardno phoneeval only |
FAQ
Is there a free LLM API with no phone verification?
Yes — every provider here requires neither a credit card nor a phone number to obtain a key.
Can I call an LLM API with no account at all?
A few, such as Pollinations and AI Horde, allow anonymous or account-free use for basic requests, with tighter rate limits.