Free LLM APIs with No Credit Card Required (2026)

Free LLM APIs with No Credit Card

Most "free tier" docs bury the credit-card requirement. This guide is straightforward: a list of providers where you can get a working API key and ship code without entering card details.

TL;DR

Provider	Card required?	What you get
Groq	No	30 RPM, 14,400 RPD on Llama 3.3 70B
Google AI Studio	No	15 RPM, 1,500 RPD on Gemini 2.0 Flash
OpenRouter	No	20 RPM, 200 RPD on free models
Together AI	No	$1 free credit + Turbo-Free models
Cerebras	No	30 RPM on Llama 3 / 4
Cohere	No	Trial keys, 20 RPM
Hugging Face	No	1,000 calls/day across all open models
GitHub Models	No (uses GitHub PAT)	15 RPM, 150 RPD
Mistral	No, but SMS verification	1B tokens/month experimental
SambaNova	No	10 RPM, free Llama 3.1 405B

All ten of the major free LLM APIs in 2026 work without a credit card. The catch is rate limits — most cap at a few hundred to a few thousand requests/day.

How to Pick One in 60 Seconds

You want speed: Groq. 30 RPM, ~1,500 tokens/sec, no card.
You want long context (1M tokens): Google AI Studio. Free Gemini API, no card.
You want to try many models without juggling keys: OpenRouter. Free models tagged :free, no card.
You want frontier 405B for free: SambaNova. Yes, really.
You want GPT-4o without an OpenAI account: GitHub Models. Use your GitHub PAT.

A 5-Minute Quick Start (Groq, OpenAI-Compatible)

from openai import OpenAI
client = OpenAI(     api_key="YOUR_GROQ_KEY",      # https://console.groq.com     base_url="https://api.groq.com/openai/v1", )
resp = client.chat.completions.create(     model="llama-3.3-70b-versatile",     messages=[{"role": "user", "content": "Hello in 5 words"}], ) print(resp.choices[0].message.content)

That's the entire integration. Same shape works on Cerebras, OpenRouter, Together, GitHub Models, and SambaNova — just change the base URL and model name.

What "No Credit Card" Costs You

You give up:

Production-grade rate limits. Most free tiers cap at ~1k requests/day.
SLA. None of these providers commit to uptime on the free tier.
Predictability. Free-tier limits change without notice — see this site's homepage status board for current limits.

Free tiers are for prototyping. The day you ship to users, you upgrade. Most providers make this seamless — same key, same code, just add billing.

Where This Goes Wrong

Common gotchas:

1. Hugging Face cold starts. Free serverless inference can take 30+ seconds the first time. Use a "warm" model like Llama 3.3 70B-Instruct. 2. Mistral SMS verification. Free tier requires a phone number. Some throwaway numbers don't work. 3. OpenRouter "free" hides daily caps. 200/day on free tier — bigger limits unlock with $10 prepaid. 4. GitHub Models is prototyping-only. Production traffic must move to Azure AI. 5. Free Gemini privacy. Free tier prompts may be used to improve Google models. Read the terms before you ship.

Closing

You can build a serious LLM-powered app in 2026 without paying anything until launch. Start with Groq for speed or Google AI Studio for long context, then graduate to OpenRouter or a direct paid plan when traffic justifies it. Bookmark this site — we track which provider's free tier is currently up and how generous each one is.