✓ No credit card required to start
Free AI APIs for Developers
Real, working free tiers from serious providers — not trials that expire in a week. Grab a key (or no key at all) and start building.
✓ Free tier
Google AI Studio
- One-line review
- The most generous official free API tier in the industry. Sign in with a Google account, get a Gemini key, build.
- Free quota
- Generous free tier with per-minute limits — check AI Studio docs for current numbers.
- Best for
- Production prototypes and learning the Gemini API.
Open AI Studio
✓ Free tier
NVIDIA NIM
- One-line review
- Free hosted endpoints for top open models — OpenAI-compatible, so your existing code just works.
- Free quota
- Free
nvapi- key; roughly 40 requests/min per model. Base URL: https://integrate.api.nvidia.com/v1
- Verified models
moonshotai/kimi-k3 · z-ai/glm-5.3 · deepseek-ai/deepseek-v4.1-flash · google/gemma-4-31b-it- Best for
- Serious open-model workloads without a GPU.
Open build.nvidia.com
✓ Free tier
Groq
- One-line review
- Blazing-fast inference on custom LPU hardware — the speed is genuinely startling the first time you try it.
- Free quota
- Free tier with rate limits; no card to start.
- Best for
- Latency-sensitive apps and real-time features.
Open Groq console
✓ No key needed
Pollinations.ai
- One-line review
- Text and image APIs with no key at all — the lowest-friction way to call an LLM from code.
- Free quota
- Free under fair use; it's a shared public service.
- Best for
- Demos, bots, hackathons and experiments.
Open pollinations.ai
✓ Free tier
OpenRouter
- One-line review
- One key, hundreds of models. Anything tagged
:free costs nothing — perfect for A/B testing models.
- Free quota
- Free models carry rate limits; paid models need credits.
- Best for
- Comparing models behind a single API.
Open openrouter.ai
✓ No account
AI Horde
- One-line review
- A volunteer GPU network for text and image generation. Use the public anonymous key — no account, ever.
- Free quota
- Queue-based; the anonymous key gets lower priority than registered workers.
- Best for
- Hobbyists and open-source tinkerers.
Open aihorde.net
Quick picker
- Hard tasks (agents, coding, complex reasoning): NVIDIA's
moonshotai/kimi-k3 or z-ai/glm-5.3.
- Light Q&A / code explanations:
google/gemma-4-31b-it on NVIDIA, or Gemini via AI Studio.
- Need speed: Groq.
- Zero setup: Pollinations.ai — no key, no signup.
Last verified: 2026-10-11 · Quotas and model lists change — always confirm on the provider's own docs.