As of October 22, 2026, eight providers offer free tiers for AI APIs, allowing developers to access LLM endpoints without charge under specific quotas. These providers include Google Gemini, Groq, OpenRouter, Mistral AI, Cloudflare Workers AI, NVIDIA, Cohere, and SambaNova. While some offer true free tiers with no payment method required and daily/monthly quota resets, others provide starter credits or trial keys that may have limitations or require a payment method for full access or higher usage. AI
IMPACT Provides developers with a list of free API access points for LLMs, enabling experimentation and development without immediate cost.
RANK_REASON Article lists available free tiers for AI APIs, not a new release from a frontier lab.
- AI Studio
- Cloudflare Workers AI
- Cohere
- Gemini 2.5 Pro
- Gemini 3.8 Flash
- Gemini 4 Argon
- Gemini API
- Gemini Embedding 2
- Gemma 4
- Google Gemini
- GPT-OSS 120B
- GPT OSS 20B
- Groq
- Lyria
- Mistral AI
- Nvidia
- OpenRouter
- SambaNova
- Veo
AI-generated summary · Google Gemini · from 2 sources. How we write summaries →