A curated list of FREE AI/ML APIs with generous free tiers, perfect for learning, prototyping, and building production applications without breaking the bank.
"The best things in life are free... especially AI APIs for learning!" - Anonymous
- 100+ AI APIs across multiple categories
- Free tier details - no credit card required for most
- Free plans, trial keys, and credits - a mix of always-free usage and starter promos
- No expiration - many free tiers don't expire
- Production-ready - APIs you can actually build with
- Natural Language Processing (NLP)
- Computer Vision & Image Processing
- Speech & Audio
- Predictive Analytics & ML Platforms
- Chatbots & Conversational AI
- Data Science & Analytics
- AI Infrastructure & Tools
- Specialized AI Services
| API | Category | Free Tier | Credits | Best For |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| OpenRouter | NLP/Chat | ✅ Yes | Free router | Zero-cost access to rotating free models |
| Groq | NLP/Chat | ✅ Yes | Free plan | Ultra-fast open-model inference |
| Mistral AI | NLP/Chat | ✅ Yes | Experiment tier | Open-weight and hosted models |
| Google Cloud AI | Multi | ✅ Yes | $300 | Vision, NLP, Translation |
| Hugging Face | ML Models | ✅ Yes | Unlimited | 100K+ models |
| Replicate | ML Models | ✅ Yes | $10-$50 | Stable Diffusion, Llama |
| Cohere | NLP | ✅ Yes | Trial key | Embeddings, rerank, chat |
| Cloudflare Workers AI | Multi | ✅ Yes | 10K neurons/day | Serverless AI in Workers |
| Cerebras Inference | NLP/Chat | ✅ Yes | Free API key | Extremely fast inference |
| SambaNova Cloud | NLP/Chat | ✅ Yes | Free tier | Fast open-model API access |
| OpenAI Moderation | Safety | ✅ Yes | Free | Text and image moderation |
| API | Description | Free Tier | Credits/Auth | Docs |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cerebras Inference | Ultra-fast hosted inference with OpenAI-compatible APIs | ✅ Free tier | Free API key | docs |
| Cohere Embed | State-of-the-art text embeddings | ✅ Trial key | 1,000 API calls/mo | docs |
| Google Gemini API | Gemini Pro and Ultra models | ✅ 60 requests/min free | Free tier | docs |
| Mistral AI | Hosted frontier and open-weight models | ✅ Free API tier | Experiment tier | docs |
| OpenRouter | One API for hundreds of models, including free variants | ✅ Free models available | openrouter/free and :free variants |
docs |
| Replicate (new models) | Llama 3, Stable Diffusion 3, and more | ✅ Unlimited (rate-limited) | $10-$50 credit | docs |
| SambaNova Cloud | Fast hosted inference for open models | ✅ Free tier | No card required for free tier | docs |
| Fireworks AI | Fast inference for 100+ LLMs including Llama 3 | ✅ API calls | $10 free credit | docs |
| Groq | Ultra-fast LLM inference with LPU architecture | ✅ Free plan | Rate-limited free usage | docs |
| Cohere | Generate, embed, rerank, and classify text | ✅ Trial key | 1,000 API calls/mo | docs |
| Google Cloud Natural Language | Sentiment, entities, syntax | ✅ 5K units/mo | $300 trial credit | docs |
| Hugging Face Inference API | 100K+ models (BERT, GPT-2, etc) | ✅ Unlimited (rate-limited) | Free account | docs |
| AI21 Labs | Jurassic-2 models | ✅ 30K tokens/mo | $5-$20 credit | docs |
| Aleph Alpha | European GPT alternative | ✅ 5K tokens/mo | €10 credit | docs |
| Perplexity AI | Search-augmented AI | ✅ 100 queries/mo | $5 credit | docs |
| You.com API | Search + AI answers | ✅ 100 queries/mo | Free tier | docs |
| DeepL | Translation API | ✅ 500K chars/mo | Free | docs |
| LibreTranslate | Self-hostable translation | ✅ Unlimited (public instances) | Free | docs |
| MeaningCloud | Sentiment, topics, classification | ✅ 20K units/mo | Free | docs |
| MonkeyLearn | Text classification, extraction | ✅ 300 queries/mo | Free | docs |
| Aylien | Text analysis, summarization | ✅ 1K reqs/day | Free trial | docs |
| Text Analytics (Azure) | Sentiment, key phrases | ✅ 5K transactions/mo | $200 trial | docs |
| Watson Natural Language | IBM Watson NLU | ✅ 30K NL items/mo | Lite plan | docs |
| SpaCy | NLP library (self-hosted) | ✅ Open source | Free | docs |
| NLTK | NLP toolkit (self-hosted) | ✅ Open source | Free | docs |
| FastText | Text classification (self-hosted) | ✅ Open source | Free | docs |
| Gensim | Topic modeling (self-hosted) | ✅ Open source | Free | docs |
| Transformers (Hugging Face) | PyTorch/TensorFlow models | ✅ Open source | Free | docs |
| Sentence Transformers | Embeddings | ✅ Open source | Free | docs |
| OpenAI Whisper | Speech-to-text (self-hosted) | ✅ Open source | Free | docs |
| Vosk | Offline speech recognition | ✅ Open source | Free | docs |
| Kaldi | Speech recognition (self-hosted) | ✅ Open source | Free | docs |
| Mozilla DeepSpeech | Speech-to-text (self-hosted) | ✅ Open source | Free | docs |
| API | Description | Free Tier | Credits/Auth | Docs |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Replicate | Stable Diffusion, SDXL, Llama | ✅ Unlimited (rate-limited) | $10-$50 credit | docs |
| Stability AI | Stable Diffusion, image generation | ✅ 25-100 images/mo | Free tier | docs |
| Hugging Face Spaces | Deploy CV models (self-hosted) | ✅ Unlimited (rate-limited) | Free | docs |
| Google Cloud Vision | Object detection, OCR, labels | ✅ 1K units/mo | $300 trial | docs |
| Amazon Rekognition | Image/video analysis | ✅ 5K images/mo | Free tier | docs |
| Azure Computer Vision | Describe, tag, OCR images | ✅ 5K transactions/mo | $200 trial | docs |
| Clarifai | Custom image recognition | ✅ 5K operations/mo | Free tier | docs |
| Imagga | Auto-tagging, color extraction | ✅ 500 reqs/mo | Free tier | docs |
| Roboflow | Pre-trained CV models | ✅ 1K images/mo | Free | docs |
| OpenCV | Computer vision library (self-hosted) | ✅ Open source | Free | docs |
| TensorFlow | ML framework (self-hosted) | ✅ Open source | Free | docs |
| PyTorch | ML framework (self-hosted) | ✅ Open source | Free | docs |
| DETR | Object detection (self-hosted) | ✅ Open source | Free | docs |
| YOLO | Real-time object detection | ✅ Open source | Free | docs |
| MediaPipe | Real-time perception (self-hosted) | ✅ Open source | Free | docs |
| Face Recognition | Face detection/recognition (self-hosted) | ✅ Open source | Free | docs |
| DeepFace | Face recognition (self-hosted) | ✅ Open source | Free | docs |
| PaddleOCR | OCR (self-hosted) | ✅ Open source | Free | docs |
| Tesseract | OCR (self-hosted) | ✅ Open source | Free | docs |
| EasyOCR | OCR (self-hosted) | ✅ Open source | Free | docs |
| Remove.bg API | Background removal | ✅ 50 images/mo | Free tier | docs |
| Clipdrop | Image enhancement, cleanup | ✅ 100 images/mo | Free tier | docs |
| Photoroom | Background removal, enhance | ✅ 100 images/mo | Free tier | docs |
| Cloudmersive | Image processing, OCR, NSFW | ✅ 800 reqs/mo | Free | docs |
| ImgIX | Image optimization, transforms | ✅ 1000 transforms/mo | Free | docs |
| ImageKit | Image CDN, transforms | ✅ 20GB bandwidth/mo | Free | docs |
| API | Description | Free Tier | Credits/Auth | Docs |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| ElevenLabs | Ultra-realistic TTS | ✅ 10K chars/mo | Free | docs |
| Google Cloud Text-to-Speech | 220+ voices, WaveNet | ✅ 1M chars/mo | $300 trial | docs |
| Amazon Polly | TTS with SSML | ✅ 5M chars/mo | Free tier | docs |
| Azure Speech Services | STT, TTS, translation | ✅ 5 hours audio/mo | $200 trial | docs |
| AssemblyAI | Transcription, speaker diarization | ✅ 3 hours audio/mo | $5-$10 credit | docs |
| Deepgram | Speech-to-text, real-time | ✅ 200 minutes/mo | Free tier | docs |
| Rev.ai | Speech recognition | ✅ 5 hours audio/mo | Free trial | docs |
| Speechmatics | Speech-to-text | ✅ 60 min/mo | Free tier | docs |
| Google Cloud Speech-to-Text | STT, real-time streaming | ✅ 60 min/mo | $300 trial | docs |
| Vosk | Offline STT (self-hosted) | ✅ Open source | Free | docs |
| Kaldi | STT toolkit (self-hosted) | ✅ Open source | Free | docs |
| Mozilla DeepSpeech | STT (self-hosted) | ✅ Open source | Free | docs |
| Coqui TTS | Text-to-speech (self-hosted) | ✅ Open source | Free | docs |
| RVC | Voice conversion (self-hosted) | ✅ Open source | Free | docs |
| Silero TTS | TTS (self-hosted) | ✅ Open source | Free | docs |
| Bark | Text-to-audio (self-hosted) | ✅ Open source | Free | docs |
| MusicGen | Music generation (self-hosted) | ✅ Open source | Free | docs |
| AudioLDM | Text-to-audio (self-hosted) | ✅ Open source | Free | docs |
| API | Description | Free Tier | Credits/Auth | Docs |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hugging Face Inference API | 100K+ models, inference | ✅ Unlimited (rate-limited) | Free account | docs |
| Replicate | Run open-source ML models | ✅ Unlimited (rate-limited) | $10-$50 credit | docs |
| Google Vertex AI | ML platform, AutoML | ✅ $300 trial credit | $300 | docs |
| Amazon SageMaker | ML platform | ✅ 250 hours free/mo | Free tier | docs |
| Azure ML | ML platform, AutoML | ✅ $200 trial credit | $200 | docs |
| H2O.ai | AutoML, driverless AI | ✅ Open source | Free | docs |
| DataRobot | AutoML platform | ✅ 14-day trial | Free trial | docs |
| RapidMiner | Data science platform | ✅ Free edition | Free | docs |
| KNIME | Data analytics platform | ✅ Open source | Free | docs |
| Orange | Data mining (self-hosted) | ✅ Open source | Free | docs |
| MLflow | ML lifecycle management | ✅ Open source | Free | docs |
| Kubeflow | ML on Kubernetes (self-hosted) | ✅ Open source | Free | docs |
| Metaflow | ML workflow (self-hosted) | ✅ Open source | Free | docs |
| Weights & Biases | ML experiment tracking | ✅ Free for individuals | Free | docs |
| Comet.ml | ML experiment tracking | ✅ Free for individuals | Free | docs |
| Neptune.ai | ML experiment tracking | ✅ Free for individuals | Free | docs |
| ClearML | ML lifecycle (self-hosted) | ✅ Open source | Free | docs |
| DVC | Data version control (self-hosted) | ✅ Open source | Free | docs |
| Pachyderm | Data versioning (self-hosted) | ✅ Open source | Free | docs |
| Feast | Feature store (self-hosted) | ✅ Open source | Free | docs |
| Hopsworks | Feature store + ML platform | ✅ Open source | Free | docs |
| BentoML | Model serving (self-hosted) | ✅ Open source | Free | docs |
| Seldon Core | Model deployment (self-hosted) | ✅ Open source | Free | docs |
| KServe | Model serving on K8s (self-hosted) | ✅ Open source | Free | docs |
| TensorFlow Serving | Model serving (self-hosted) | ✅ Open source | Free | docs |
| TorchServe | PyTorch model serving (self-hosted) | ✅ Open source | Free | docs |
| ONNX Runtime | Model inference (self-hosted) | ✅ Open source | Free | docs |
| Triton Inference Server | NVIDIA model serving (self-hosted) | ✅ Open source | Free | docs |
| API | Description | Free Tier | Credits/Auth | Docs |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cerebras Inference | OpenAI-compatible chat completions with very fast responses | ✅ Free tier | Free API key | docs |
| Cohere Chat | Command models for chat, tools, and retrieval | ✅ Trial key | 1,000 API calls/mo | docs |
| Groq | OpenAI-compatible chat with generous free-plan limits | ✅ Free plan | Rate-limited free usage | docs |
| Google Dialogflow | NLP + conversation management | ✅ Unlimited (rate-limited) | $300 trial | docs |
| Mistral AI | Hosted chat API with a free experimental tier | ✅ Free API tier | Experiment tier | docs |
| OpenRouter | Unified chat API with zero-cost free-model routing | ✅ Free models available | openrouter/free and :free variants |
docs |
| Rasa | Open-source chatbot framework | ✅ Open source | Free | docs |
| SambaNova Cloud | Fast chat inference for open models | ✅ Free tier | Free tier limits apply | docs |
| Botpress | Visual bot builder (self-hosted) | ✅ Open source | Free | docs |
| Microsoft Bot Framework | Bot development SDK | ✅ Free | Free | docs |
| Watson Assistant | IBM chatbot builder | ✅ Lite plan | Free | docs |
| Landbot | No-code chatbot builder | ✅ Free plan | Free | docs |
| Perplexity AI | Search-augmented chat | ✅ 100 queries/mo | Free tier | docs |
| You.com API | Chat with web search | ✅ 100 queries/mo | Free | docs |
| Poe | Multiple AI models chat | ✅ Limited free | Free | docs |
| Hugging Face Chat | Open models chat interface | ✅ Free | Free | docs |
| Ollama | Run LLMs locally (self-hosted) | ✅ Open source | Free | docs |
| LM Studio | Desktop LLM runner (self-hosted) | ✅ Open source | Free | docs |
| GPT4All | Local LLMs (self-hosted) | ✅ Open source | Free | docs |
| LocalAI | Self-hosted OpenAI alternative | ✅ Open source | Free | docs |
| Text Generation Inference | Hugging Face model serving (self-hosted) | ✅ Open source | Free | docs |
| vLLM | High-throughput LLM serving (self-hosted) | ✅ Open source | Free | docs |
| TensorRT-LLM | NVIDIA LLM optimization (self-hosted) | ✅ Open source | Free | docs |
| API | Description | Free Tier | Credits/Auth | Docs |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Google BigQuery | Data warehouse | ✅ 1TB queries/mo | $300 trial | docs |
| Snowflake | Cloud data platform | ✅ 30-day trial | $400 credit | docs |
| Databricks | Unified data analytics | ✅ Community Edition | Free | docs |
| Jupyter Notebook | Interactive computing (self-hosted) | ✅ Open source | Free | docs |
| Google Colab | Hosted Jupyter notebooks | ✅ Free GPU/TPU | Free | docs |
| Kaggle Kernels | Notebooks + datasets | ✅ Free GPU/TPU | Free | docs |
| Mode Analytics | SQL + notebooks | ✅ Free for individuals | Free | docs |
| Metabase | BI & dashboards (self-hosted) | ✅ Open source | Free | docs |
| Superset | Data visualization (self-hosted) | ✅ Open source | Free | docs |
| Redash | Query & visualize (self-hosted) | ✅ Open source | Free | docs |
| Grafana | Metrics dashboard (self-hosted) | ✅ Open source | Free | docs |
| Apache Spark | Distributed computing (self-hosted) | ✅ Open source | Free | docs |
| Dask | Parallel computing (self-hosted) | ✅ Open source | Free | docs |
| Ray | Distributed computing (self-hosted) | ✅ Open source | Free | docs |
| Polars | Fast DataFrame (self-hosted) | ✅ Open source | Free | docs |
| Vaex | Lazy DataFrames (self-hosted) | ✅ Open source | Free | docs |
| Streamlit | Data apps (self-hosted) | ✅ Open source | Free | docs |
| Dash | Python dashboards (self-hosted) | ✅ Open source | Free | docs |
| Panel | Data apps (self-hosted) | ✅ Open source | Free | docs |
| Shiny | R/Python web apps (self-hosted) | ✅ Open source | Free | docs |
| Bokeh | Interactive visualizations (self-hosted) | ✅ Open source | Free | docs |
| Plotly | Interactive charts (self-hosted) | ✅ Open source | Free | docs |
| Altair | Declarative viz (self-hosted) | ✅ Open source | Free | docs |
| Matplotlib | Plotting (self-hosted) | ✅ Open source | Free | docs |
| Seaborn | Statistical viz (self-hosted) | ✅ Open source | Free | docs |
| Pandas | Data analysis (self-hosted) | ✅ Open source | Free | docs |
| NumPy | Numerical computing (self-hosted) | ✅ Open source | Free | docs |
| SciPy | Scientific computing (self-hosted) | ✅ Open source | Free | docs |
| Scikit-learn | ML algorithms (self-hosted) | ✅ Open source | Free | docs |
| XGBoost | Gradient boosting (self-hosted) | ✅ Open source | Free | docs |
| LightGBM | Gradient boosting (self-hosted) | ✅ Open source | Free | docs |
| CatBoost | Gradient boosting (self-hosted) | ✅ Open source | Free | docs |
| API | Description | Free Tier | Credits/Auth | Docs |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hugging Face | Model hub, datasets, spaces | ✅ Unlimited (rate-limited) | Free | docs |
| Replicate | Run open-source models | ✅ Unlimited (rate-limited) | $10-$50 credit | docs |
| Modal | Serverless GPU compute | ✅ $30/month free | $30/mo | docs |
| RunPod | GPU cloud instances | ✅ $10-$50 credit | $10-$50 | docs |
| Vast.ai | Rent GPU servers | ✅ $10-$25 credit | $10-$25 | docs |
| Paperspace | GPU cloud + notebooks | ✅ Free GPU hours | $10-$50 credit | docs |
| Google Colab | Free GPU/TPU notebooks | ✅ Free tier | Free | docs |
| Kaggle Kernels | Notebooks with free GPU | ✅ Free GPU/TPU | Free | docs |
| Bardeen | No-code AI automation | ✅ Free plan | Free | docs |
| Zapier | AI-powered automation | ✅ 100 tasks/mo | Free | docs |
| n8n | Workflow automation (self-hosted) | ✅ Open source | Free | docs |
| LangChain | LLM app framework (self-hosted) | ✅ Open source | Free | docs |
| LlamaIndex | LLM data framework (self-hosted) | ✅ Open source | Free | docs |
| Haystack | NLP framework (self-hosted) | ✅ Open source | Free | docs |
| Semantic Kernel | Microsoft LLM orchestration (self-hosted) | ✅ Open source | Free | docs |
| DSPy | LLM programming (self-hosted) | ✅ Open source | Free | docs |
| Guidance | Prompt programming (self-hosted) | ✅ Open source | Free | docs |
| Outlines | Structured text generation (self-hosted) | ✅ Open source | Free | docs |
| Jinja | Templating (self-hosted) | ✅ Open source | Free | docs |
| Handlebars | Templating (self-hosted) | ✅ Open source | Free | docs |
| Pydantic | Data validation (self-hosted) | ✅ Open source | Free | docs |
| FastAPI | API framework (self-hosted) | ✅ Open source | Free | docs |
| Flask | Web framework (self-hosted) | ✅ Open source | Free | docs |
| Django | Web framework (self-hosted) | ✅ Open source | Free | docs |
| Starlette | ASGI framework (self-hosted) | ✅ Open source | Free | docs |
| Uvicorn | ASGI server (self-hosted) | ✅ Open source | Free | docs |
| Gunicorn | WSGI server (self-hosted) | ✅ Open source | Free | docs |
| Celery | Task queue (self-hosted) | ✅ Open source | Free | docs |
| Redis | Cache/message broker (self-hosted) | ✅ Open source | Free | docs |
| RabbitMQ | Message broker (self-hosted) | ✅ Open source | Free | docs |
| Kafka | Event streaming (self-hosted) | ✅ Open source | Free | docs |
| PostgreSQL | Database (self-hosted) | ✅ Open source | Free | docs |
| MySQL | Database (self-hosted) | ✅ Open source | Free | docs |
| MongoDB | Document DB (self-hosted) | ✅ Open source | Free | docs |
| SQLite | Embedded DB (self-hosted) | ✅ Open source | Free | docs |
| Pinecone | Vector database | ✅ 1M vectors free | Free tier | docs |
| Weaviate | Vector DB (self-hosted) | ✅ Open source | Free | docs |
| Qdrant | Vector DB (self-hosted) | ✅ Open source | Free | docs |
| Milvus | Vector DB (self-hosted) | ✅ Open source | Free | docs |
| Chroma | Vector DB (self-hosted) | ✅ Open source | Free | docs |
| FAISS | Vector similarity (self-hosted) | ✅ Open source | Free | docs |
| Annoy | Approximate nearest neighbors (self-hosted) | ✅ Open source | Free | docs |
| ScaNN | Vector search (self-hosted) | ✅ Open source | Free | docs |
| HNSWlib | Graph-based ANN (self-hosted) | ✅ Open source | Free | docs |
| Nginx | Web server (self-hosted) | ✅ Open source | Free | docs |
| Traefik | Reverse proxy (self-hosted) | ✅ Open source | Free | docs |
| Caddy | Web server (self-hosted) | ✅ Open source | Free | docs |
| Docker | Containerization (self-hosted) | ✅ Open source | Free | docs |
| Kubernetes | Container orchestration (self-hosted) | ✅ Open source | Free | docs |
| Helm | K8s package manager (self-hosted) | ✅ Open source | Free | docs |
| Terraform | Infrastructure as code (self-hosted) | ✅ Open source | Free | docs |
| Ansible | Configuration management (self-hosted) | ✅ Open source | Free | docs |
| Pulumi | Infrastructure as code (self-hosted) | ✅ Open source | Free | docs |
| GitHub Actions | CI/CD (self-hosted) | ✅ Free for public repos | Free | docs |
| GitLab CI | CI/CD (self-hosted) | ✅ Open source | Free | docs |
| Jenkins | CI/CD (self-hosted) | ✅ Open source | Free | docs |
| CircleCI | CI/CD | ✅ Free for open source | Free | docs |
| Travis CI | CI/CD | ✅ Free for open source | Free | docs |
| GitHub Copilot | AI pair programmer | ✅ 30-day free trial | $10/mo after | docs |
| Cursor | AI code editor | ✅ Free plan | Free | docs |
| Windsurf | AI IDE | ✅ Free tier | Free | docs |
| Codeium | AI code completion | ✅ Free | Free | docs |
| Tabnine | AI code completion | ✅ Free tier | Free | docs |
| Amazon CodeWhisperer | AI code companion | ✅ Free for individuals | Free | docs |
| API | Description | Free Tier | Credits/Auth | Docs |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Moderation APIs | Content moderation | |||
| OpenAI Moderation | Detect harmful content | ✅ Free | Free for OpenAI API users | docs |
| Perspective API | Toxic comment detection | ✅ Free | Free | docs |
| Hive Moderation | Image/video moderation | ✅ 1K reqs/mo | Free | docs |
| Azure Content Moderator | Text, image, video moderation | ✅ 1K transactions/mo | $200 trial | docs |
| Search & RAG | ||||
| Pinecone | Vector search | ✅ 1M vectors free | Free | docs |
| Weaviate | Vector search + modules | ✅ Free (self-hosted) | Free | docs |
| Typesense | Search engine | ✅ 10K docs free | Free | docs |
| Meilisearch | Search engine (self-hosted) | ✅ Open source | Free | docs |
| Document AI | ||||
| Google Document AI | Document parsing | ✅ 1K pages/mo | $300 trial | docs |
| Azure Form Recognizer | Document extraction | ✅ 500 pages/mo | $200 trial | docs |
| Amazon Textract | Text & data extraction | ✅ 1K pages/mo | Free tier | docs |
| Adobe PDF Extract | PDF parsing | ✅ 1K pages/mo | Free | docs |
| Code Generation | ||||
| OpenRouter Free Code Models | Code generation via free hosted models | ✅ Free models available | openrouter/free or :free variants |
docs |
| GitHub Copilot | AI pair programmer | ✅ 30-day trial | $10/mo | docs |
| Codeium | Free code completion | ✅ Free | Free | docs |
| Tabnine | AI code completion | ✅ Free tier | Free | docs |
| Video & Animation | ||||
| Runway ML | Video generation, editing | ✅ 125 sec video/mo | Free | docs |
| Pika Labs | Text-to-video | ✅ Free tier | Free | docs |
| Stable Video Diffusion | Video generation (self-hosted) | ✅ Open source | Free | docs |
| 3D & AR/VR | ||||
| Luma AI | 3D model generation | ✅ 100 renders/mo | Free | docs |
| Kaedim | 3D model generation | ✅ 10 models/mo | Free | docs |
| Sloyd | 3D model API | ✅ 100 models/mo | Free | docs |
- Start with Groq, OpenRouter, or Mistral - easy onboarding and real free-tier access
- Use Hugging Face - thousands of free models
- Try Google Colab - free GPU, no setup
- Explore Replicate - one-line model deployment
- Check rate limits - ensure it handles your traffic
- Review pricing - understand costs at scale
- Evaluate latency - test response times
- Consider self-hosting - for privacy/cost control
- Build fallbacks - handle API failures gracefully
- Use free tiers - learn without spending
- Experiment with multiple - compare performance
- Build projects - apply what you learn
- Contribute to open source - give back to community
Start with the category that matches your project needs.
Look at the "Free Tier" and "Credits/Auth" columns to understand limits.
Click the Docs link to understand API capabilities and limitations.
Most require free registration for an API key.
Most APIs provide curl examples or SDKs.
import os
from openai import OpenAI
client = OpenAI(
api_key=os.environ["GROQ_API_KEY"],
base_url="https://api.groq.com/openai/v1",
)
response = client.responses.create(
model="openai/gpt-oss-20b",
input="Hello!",
)
print(response.output_text)Cost: Groq has a real free plan with model-specific rate limits. Check the docs for the latest per-model limits.
These are good options if you want a free tier that is clearly documented today:
| API | Bonus | Conditions |
|---|---|---|
| OpenRouter | openrouter/free router |
Free-model availability varies by model and demand |
| Groq | Free plan | Rate-limited by model and account tier |
| Mistral AI | Experiment tier | Free API tier with restrictive rate limits |
| Cloudflare Workers AI | 10,000 neurons/day | Included with Workers Free plan |
| Cerebras Inference | Free API key | Lower limits than paid tiers |
| SambaNova Cloud | Free tier | No payment method required for free tier |
| Cohere | Trial key | 1,000 API calls/mo |
| Fireworks AI | Free credits | New users receive free credits |
| Google Cloud | $300 free credit | 90-day trial |
| AWS | $100-$200 free credit | 12-month free tier |
| Azure | $200 free credit | 30-day trial |
We welcome contributions! Please read CONTRIBUTING.md to get started.
- Fork the repository
- Add new AI APIs (with free tiers)
- Update existing API info (free tier changes)
- Fix typos or improve documentation
- Submit a Pull Request
This project is licensed under the MIT License - see the LICENSE file for details.
- Original inspiration from public-apis/public-apis
- The amazing AI/ML community for building these accessible APIs
- All the companies offering generous free tiers
Made with ❤️ for the AI community
Last updated: April 2026
