The fastest way to start building is an API that doesn't gate its free tier behind a payment method. Every provider below was verified to require no credit card at signup for its free access — so there's no risk of a surprise charge when you cross a limit; you simply get rate-limited.
Watch two things as you choose: the per-minute / per-day rate limits (fine for prototypes, tight for production) and whether commercial use is allowed on the free tier. Both are in the table.
Top pick — Cloudflare Workers AI
Highest free daily volume for a real side project Details →
20 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 |
| Groq | Open-weight models (Llama, Qwen, GPT-OSS) plus Whisper, no credit card required | e.g. llama-3.1-8b-instant: 30 RPM/14.4K RPD/6K TPM/500K TPD; llama-3.3-70b-versatile: 30 RPM/1K RPD/12K TPM/100K TPD; qwen3-32b: 60 RPM/1K RPD/6K TPM/500K TPD; similar for GPT-OSS and Whisper models | no cardphone requiredcommercial 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 |
| 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 |
| SambaNova Cloud | Rate-limited free tier (applies when no payment method is linked) across all models | Free Tier: 20 RPM / 20 RPD / 200,000 TPD across all models; Developer Tier (card required): 60-240 RPM depending on model | no cardcommercial OKOpenAI-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 |
| ModelScope (API-Inference) | ~2,000 free API calls/day across open-weight models (Qwen3, DeepSeek, GLM, Llama, etc.) via API-Inference | ~2,000 calls/day; concurrency/QPS caps applied and dynamically adjusted | no cardeval onlyOpenAI-compatible |
| 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 |
| 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 |
| 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 |
| Speechmatics | 3,000 minutes (50 hours)/month speech-to-text + 1,000,000 characters (~20 hrs)/month text-to-speech | 2 concurrent real-time sessions on the free plan | no card |
| 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 |
| Hume AI (Octave TTS) | 10,000 characters/month TTS (~10 minutes) on the Free plan | 15 requests per minute | no cardcommercial 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
Can I use an LLM API for free without a credit card?
Yes. Providers such as Google Gemini, Groq, Cloudflare Workers AI and OpenRouter give a free tier with no card required — you are limited by rate, not billing, so you cannot be charged by surprise.
Will I be charged if I exceed the free limits?
No. On a no-card free tier you get rate-limited (HTTP 429) rather than billed. You would have to explicitly add a payment method before any spend is possible.
Are these free tiers okay for commercial use?
Some are, some are not — each row shows a commercial-use flag, confirmed against the provider’s own terms.