Free AI API rate limits, compared: which free tiers can do real work and which are demo taps
A free tier is only as good as its rate limit, and rate limits are the field providers least want to print in big type. We track them as structured data across 42 providers: 22 have a free tier of some kind, and the limits range from '~40 requests per minute, no daily cap' to '$0.10 of credit per month'. Here is the whole picture with the numbers our catalog actually carries, including the places where it carries none.
The rate-limit table
| Provider | Free limit | Card required? | Realistic use |
|---|---|---|---|
| NVIDIA NIM | ~40 requests/min, no daily cap | No | Real work: sustained interactive use on a rotating model list |
| Google AI Studio | ~1,500 requests/day on the free endpoint | No | Real work: a full day of scripting, rotating model lineup |
| Groq | 30 requests/min; 1K to 14.4K requests/day depending on model | No | Genuinely fast lanes, but the daily cap swings hard by model |
| Kilo Code | 200 requests/hour with sign-in | No | Real work inside a coding assistant; BYOK beyond it |
| Cloudflare Workers AI | 10K neurons/day, 300 requests/min | No | Decent burst capacity; 'neurons' are Cloudflare's own metering unit |
| OpenRouter | 50 requests/day on free models; $10 of PAYG credit raises it to 1,000/day | No for the base tier | Light daily use; the $10 unlock is the best-value move on this list |
| Mistral Le Chat | Base-tier messages, web search, libraries, and image generation | Yes | Daily-driver chat subject to fair use; the API is a separate paid lane |
| OpenCode | 5 free models on OpenCode Zen; per-model limits rotate | Yes | A finite promotional tier; check the current model set first |
| Cline | Hosted free models with per-model limits that rotate | No | Useful in the editor; BYOK when you hit a wall |
| Ollama | Local: unlimited. Cloud free tier: 1 concurrent model | No | Local is the only truly unlimited lane on this list |
| OpenAI Codex | Free with a ChatGPT account; the 1x tier is ~20 messages per 5-hour window | Yes | A taste of the agent, not a workload |
| OVHcloud AI Endpoints | 2 requests/min per IP without a key; 400 requests/min with a paid key | No for the IP lane | 2 requests/min is a health check, not an app |
| SiliconFlow | 100 requests/day plus $1 in credit | No | Evaluation of specific models |
| Hugging Face | ~$0.10 of inference credit per month ($2 on PRO) | No | The smallest allowance we track; demo-only by design |
The seven we classify as usable
In the catalog we flag a free tier as 'meaningful' when sustained real use is plausible under the published limits. Seven of the 22 qualify: NVIDIA NIM, Google AI Studio, Mistral, Kilo Code, OpenCode, Cline, and OpenRouter. Look at the table and you can see why: those are the lanes with continuous allowances (per minute, per hour, or per day) rather than a one-time pile of credit that dies the first weekend you enjoy yourself. Groq is the closest miss. Thirty requests per minute is generous, but the daily cap swings from 14.4K down to 1K depending on which model you pick, so plan around the model you actually want, not the headline number. The free-tier hub carries the current classification for all 22.
The demo-only tier, and why we still track it
The rest are scoped as trials, and that is fine as long as you treat them that way. One-time grants: Hyperbolic hands you $1, Alibaba gives 1M free tokens per model for 90 days (plus 70M+ tokens for new accounts), BytePlus ModelArk offers 500K free tokens per LLM and 2M for vision models, and OVHcloud's $200 public-cloud trial credit can be pointed at AI Endpoints. These are excellent for benchmarking a provider you might pay later. They are not foundations. One honest gap: GitHub Models and DeepSeek both run free lanes, but our catalog carries no hard numbers for either, so they are absent from the table rather than represented by invented ones.
The working pattern, as we keep saying on this blog, is not picking one free tier: it is holding several and routing around whichever one is exhausted. That is why our chat page is bring-your-own-key and browser-direct: your keys stay in your own vault, requests go straight from your browser to the provider, and leaving a provider costs one click. The free-tier hub is the maintained version of this article's table, and the pricing page covers what happens when you outgrow all of it.