What's free
$0 Free plan: access to cloud-hosted open models (Qwen, GPT-OSS, DeepSeek, etc.) via API
Rate limits
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)
The catch
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.
Free models · sample
deepseek-v4-flashdeepseek-v4-progemma4:31bglm-5.1glm-5.2gpt-oss:120bgpt-oss:20bkimi-k2.5A sample of models reachable on the free tier — the live catalog changes. Pull the current set with GET https://ollama.com/v1/models.
Quickstart — chat completions
from openai import OpenAI
client = OpenAI(base_url="https://ollama.com/v1", api_key="<YOUR_FREE_API_KEY>")
resp = client.chat.completions.create(
model="deepseek-v4-flash",
messages=[{"role": "user", "content": "Hello!"}],
)
print(resp.choices[0].message.content)…or with curl:
curl https://ollama.com/v1/chat/completions \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $API_KEY" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{"model":"deepseek-v4-flash","messages":[{"role":"user","content":"Hello!"}]}'