What's free
1,000,000 tokens (example figure, varies by model), international/Singapore region only
Rate limits
Qwen open & proprietary models
The catch
Excludes batch processing, context caching, fine-tuning, and dedicated deployment
Quickstart — chat completions
from openai import OpenAI
client = OpenAI(base_url="https://dashscope-intl.aliyuncs.com/compatible-mode/v1", api_key="<YOUR_FREE_API_KEY>")
resp = client.chat.completions.create(
model="<a-free-model>",
messages=[{"role": "user", "content": "Hello!"}],
)
print(resp.choices[0].message.content)…or with curl:
curl https://dashscope-intl.aliyuncs.com/compatible-mode/v1/chat/completions \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $API_KEY" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{"model":"<a-free-model>","messages":[{"role":"user","content":"Hello!"}]}'