Eight AI API providers offer free tiers without a credit card as of October 2026

As of October 22, 2026, eight providers offer free AI API access that requires no payment method: Google Gemini, Groq, OpenRouter, Mistral, Cloudflare Workers AI, NVIDIA's API catalog, Cohere and SambaNova. Six other providers offer starter credits instead, which are one-time trials rather than ongoing free tiers. All eight use OpenAI-compatible chat completion endpoints, so a single client can work across them. Each free tier has limits on requests per minute, requests per day or tokens, which are set by the providers and may change. Google warns that data sent on its unpaid tier may be used to improve its products and reviewed by humans, so sensitive information should be avoided.
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