Free AI API credits in 2026: what each provider actually gives you

Most of the free-credit list you will find online does not exist

Search for a free AI API credit and you will find a wall of write-ups promising dollars that never arrive. The reason is simple: the providers people write about are not the ones handing out credits. Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Mistral and DeepSeek all bill per token with no signup bonus at all. We read those provider pages ourselves on 2026-10-26 and the answer on every one was the same. This article is the opposite of that wall: the complete list of the offers that do exist, the providers where there is provably nothing to claim, and the discounts that are worth more than either and are not called discounts.

Everything here comes from our own provider catalog, which records the source URL and the date every offer was last checked against the provider's own page. If an offer is not in that catalog with a date on it, we do not list it. You can check the same rows on the live promos page, or compare every provider side by side on AI Hub.

Every provider we track, and what it actually gives you

This is every provider in our catalog carrying a tracked signup bonus or promo code. The last column is the date we last confirmed the offer against the provider's own page, and where we have since looked again without being able to confirm it, it says so instead of showing you a date we did not check.

Six rows in that table are marked as checked on 2026-10-26 but last confirmed in mid-June: we went back to the provider's page and the offer was no longer stated there. We are not calling them expired, because a provider can withdraw an offer without saying so, but we are also not going to keep presenting them as live. Six more rows were confirmed on the day: SiliconFlow still starts new accounts with a dollar, OVHcloud still hands out a two hundred dollar Public Cloud credit, Hugging Face now gives free users no monthly credits at all, NVIDIA's build service is a rate-limited free tier rather than a thousand credits, and Scaleway's Generative APIs are free while in beta rather than handing out a million tokens.

Five providers where there is no dollar to chase

We read these pricing pages directly on 2026-10-26. None of them advertises a new-account credit, a promo code or a signup bonus, and each row links to the page we read so you can confirm it. This is the part of the list most write-ups leave out.

OpenRouter belongs in this group too, though for a different reason: its credits page sits behind a sign-in, so we will not claim a number we cannot read. Until we can read it, treat its new-account credit as unconfirmed. Perplexity is the same problem in a different shape: its student page served us a security challenge rather than its terms, so its two referral rows stay marked as historical records.

The discounts that are not called discounts

The best value in the coding-plan market is rarely a promo code. It is a billing period. Z.AI publishes monthly, quarterly and yearly prices for the same plan, and the quarterly and yearly prices are what most comparisons quote as the headline, because a thirty percent yearly discount makes the number look better. Kimi Code publishes the same monthly to annual step, and Kilo Pass publishes an annual price with a twelve-month savings journey whose bonus changes month to month. We re-read all three pages on 2026-10-26 and put the figures in our catalog.

The Kilo figure is worth reading twice: the published twelve-month journey shows a ten percent bonus in month one, a fifty percent welcome bonus in month two and a forty percent maximum unlocked at month eight, totalling 188.65 dollars of bonus on a 588 dollar annual subscription, which their own calculator calls thirty two percent extra value over twelve months. If you are going to keep a coding subscription for a year, the annual price is the number to compare, not the monthly one. Kimi is the other one worth pricing this way: its four tiers cost 19, 39, 99 and 199 dollars a month, or 180, 372, 948 and 1,908 dollars a year.

A free model is not a credit

The OpenCode Zen service lists nine models marked free on its docs page, including GLM-5.3-Flash, DeepSeek V4.1 Flash and Nemotron 3 Ultra. That is worth knowing and it is not a credit: it is a free tier with its own limits, and the list changed between our two checks, from seven models on 2026-09-20 to nine on 2026-10-26. The same distinction applies to Groq and GitHub Models, which give you a rate-limited free tier with no card and nothing to spend. A free tier saves you the first bill. A credit pays part of it.

How we checked, and what would change our answer

Every row in this article was checked against the provider's own pricing, plan or campaign page on 2026-10-26, and the source URL is linked from the row. Where a provider's page is behind a sign-in, we say so rather than quoting a number we cannot see. Our catalog records two dates per offer: when it was last confirmed, and when we last looked. The promos page groups anything outside its ninety day window separately instead of presenting it as current.

If a provider changes its terms, this article is wrong until we re-check it, and the catalog is what makes that check cheap: the dates are attached to the rows, so we re-read the ones that have gone stale rather than rewriting the list from scratch. The AI Hub plans table carries the same data for subscription tiers, and provider guides carries the setup side.

One caveat worth stating plainly: free-credit offers are the fastest-decaying thing on this site. Six of the twenty-four rows above were already in that state when we checked them, and the count was zero in our favour on the rest only because someone re-read the pages. The honest summary is that a promo code is a thing to check, not a thing to plan around.