LLM Perks

Free API credits and tiers

API, cloud, and AI tool credits for developers, startups, and students. Every program is checked against its official page, and links go straight to the provider.

39 programs10 without a cardchecked: 2026-09-24

Free API credits and tiers 20

Signup credits and standing free tiers for LLM and AI APIs.

Google
Gemini API free tier (Google AI Studio)
Free Gemini 3.x Flash/Flash-Lite and 2.5 Pro/Flash/Flash-Lite with rate limits

Google account and an AI Studio API key; free-tier content may be used to improve Google products

No cardOngoing
OpenRouter
OpenRouter :free models
50 requests/day, or 1,000/day after a one-time $10 top-up; 20 requests/min

OpenRouter account; applies to :free model variants

No cardOngoing
Groq
Groq free plan
Free rate-limited access (e.g. gpt-oss-120b: 30 RPM, 1K requests/day, 200K tokens/day)

GroqCloud account

Ongoing
Mistral AI
Mistral Free plan API credits
$10/month in API credits

Mistral account on the Free plan

Monthly
Cerebras
Cerebras free trial
$5 in credits; free-trial tier with 1M tokens/day (5 RPM)

A verified payment method is required to activate the API

Card requiredNot stated
Cloudflare
Cloudflare Workers AI free allocation
10,000 Neurons per day

Workers Free or Paid plan

Daily, ongoing
Cohere
Cohere trial API key
1,000 API calls per month (Chat: 20 requests/min)

Cohere account; evaluation use only

No cardMonthly, ongoing
Hugging Face
Hugging Face Inference Providers credits
$0.10/month for free users; $2.00/month with PRO

Hugging Face account; requests routed through Hugging Face

Monthly
Z.ai (Zhipu)
Z.ai free Flash models
GLM-4.7-Flash, GLM-4.5-Flash and GLM-4.6V-Flash free for input and output

Z.ai API account

Ongoing
Alibaba Cloud
Alibaba Cloud Model Studio new-user quota
About 1M tokens per model, counted separately for each model

Singapore region (international); complete account info; real-time inference only

90 days from activation
Scaleway
Scaleway Generative APIs free tier
First 1,000,000 tokens free, plus 60 minutes of Whisper transcription

Scaleway account

One-time
AI21 Labs
AI21 Studio free trial
$10 in credits

New account

No card7 days
Fireworks AI
Fireworks AI signup credits
$1 in free credits

New account

Not stated
Modal
Modal Starter plan compute
$30/month in free compute

Starter plan ($0 base fee)

Monthly
Google Cloud
Google Cloud free trial
$300 welcome credit

New customers who have never paid for Google Cloud, Maps or Firebase

Card required90 days
Amazon Web Services
AWS Free Tier credits
Up to $200 ($100 at signup plus up to $100 for exploring services)

New AWS account on the free plan; Amazon Bedrock is available

6 months or until the credits are used
Microsoft Azure
Azure free account
$200 credit

Phone number, a non-prepaid card and a Microsoft or GitHub account

Card required30 days
Voyage AI (MongoDB)
Voyage AI free embedding tokens
First 200M tokens on voyage-4, voyage-code-3 and rerank models (50M on older models)

Per account; not applicable to the Batch API

One-time
Deepgram
Deepgram signup credit
$200 credit for speech-to-text and TTS

New pay-as-you-go account

No cardNot stated
AssemblyAI
AssemblyAI signup credits
$50 in credits

New account; the free tier is limited to 5 new streams per minute

No cardNot stated
Program terms change. Check the current requirements on the provider's site before applying.

FAQ

Where can I get free AI API credits?

Standing free tiers exist at Google AI Studio (Gemini), OpenRouter, Groq, Cloudflare Workers AI, and Cohere; one-time credits come from AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, AI21, Fireworks, and others. The list is checked by hand against official pages.

How many credits can a startup get?

The largest programs are Google for Startups Cloud Program (up to $350,000 for AI startups), AWS Activate (up to $200,000 via partners), and Microsoft for Startups (up to $150,000). Terms depend on stage and funding.

Which AI services are free for students?

GitHub Copilot Student, the GitHub Student Developer Pack, Azure for Students, the JetBrains Student Pack, and a year of Google AI for students (claim by 31 December 2026).