22 of the 42 AI providers we track have a free tier. Only 7 are actually useful.
Disclosure: this article links to some providers through our referral links. If you sign up through one, we may earn credit or a commission. It never changes what we recommend — the data says what it says.
Every AI provider's landing page says 'free tier'. What they don't say is whether you can do anything real with it. We maintain a structured catalog of 42 providers — prices, rate limits, free-tier terms, the works — and one of the fields we track is whether a free tier is *meaningful*: usable for genuine day-to-day work, not a 100-credit demo tap that dies the moment you point a script at it. As of today, 22 providers list a free tier. Seven pass the meaningful bar. Here's the list, with the real limits.
The 7 that hold up
| Provider | What you actually get |
|---|---|
| OpenRouter | 50 requests/day across free-tier models with no card; adding $10 in PAYG credits unlocks the much larger free-model allowance |
| Google AI Studio | Hosted free endpoint with open and proprietary models; the model list rotates, so check the current lineup |
| NVIDIA NIM | Free endpoint, no credit card; featured models rotate — worth checking what's currently hosted |
| Mistral (Le Chat Free) | Base-tier allowances on messages, web search, libraries, and image generation |
| OpenCode | 5 free models on OpenCode Zen for a limited time; model set and per-model limits rotate |
| Cline | Open-source; the Cline provider offers hosted free models with per-model limits |
| Kilo | Free plan with sign-in; BYOK supported |
The 15 that didn't make the cut
The rest of the 22 aren't scams — they're just scoped differently. Some are trial credit that expires. Some are rate-limited to the point of being evaluation-only. Some are 'free' inside a product that upsells you at the exact moment you depend on it. We track them all in the directory regardless, because 'evaluation-only' is still useful when you're evaluating. Just don't architect a side project around one.
The pattern that actually works: mix them
No single free tier is a strategy — the limits differ per provider precisely so you'll eventually pay. The working pattern in 2026 is bring-your-own-key: hold free accounts at several of these, and route tasks to whichever has headroom. That's why our chat page is BYOK and browser-direct: your keys live in your account vault, the page calls providers straight from your browser (we relay nothing — you can watch it in devtools), and a split view lets you run the same prompt through two providers side by side. Free tiers stop being a trap when you can leave any of them in one click.