There are several good catalogs of free AI APIs. They differ less in what they list than in what a program can do with the list — and that is the axis this page compares, because it is the one you can verify from outside.
The short version: most of these are documents. This one is also an interface. Every other capability below follows from that difference.
> These comparisons were last re-checked on 2026-10-05 (the mnfst/awesome-free-llm-apis column on 2026-08-26). > They were accurate against each project's live site on that date, and any of these projects may have shipped new capabilities since. Treat the table below as a dated snapshot, not as a current statement. Next re-check due 2026-11-04.
| Capability | AI Deals Sentinel | cheahjs free-llm-api-resources | mnfst/awesome-free-llm-apis | free-llm.com | WotAI |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Callable as a tool, not just readable | **yes — /mcp, JSON-RPC 2.0, protocol 2025-06-18, 3 tools** | yes — /mcp on its docs site: documentation search tools | no | no | no |
| Machine-readable catalog feed | **yes — ai-deals.json and api-health.json** | docs llms.txt only | no | no | no |
| Per-entry "last checked" date | yes — 111 of 111 | no | no | site-level "October 2026" only | article-level "July 6, 2026" only |
| Machine-readable "an agent can use this" flag | **yes — agent_usable — 90 of 111** | no | no | no | no |
| Dead offers kept, dated and labelled | yes — 16 of 111 | not addressed | not systematic | labelled, not dated — 5 of 60 entries marked discontinued | no — explicitly culled |
| Measured liveness of the no-auth data APIs, dated per entry | **yes — api-health.json — 29 of 31** | no | no | no | claims re-probing; publishes no frequency, timestamp or per-entry date |
| Every entry links the provider's own page | yes — 111 of 111 | yes | yes | yes | yes |
| Offer rows re-checked automatically | no — re-checked by hand — 18 of 95 available offers last verified before 2026-09-09; median age 12 days as of 2026-10-09 | claimed — "automatically updated from provider APIs"; site dated March 2026 | unknown | no — "community-powered" | claimed, not verifiable from outside |
| Breadth | available offers, of all rows — 95 of 111 | 26+ providers | model-level tables | 53+ providers | ~110 models / 16 providers |
This catalog answers on /mcp — JSON-RPC 2.0, protocol 2025-06-18, three tools — so an agent can query it directly instead of fetching a page and parsing prose out of it. It also publishes ai-deals.json and api-health.json for anything that would rather read a feed, and [/llms.txt](/llms.txt) describing both.
One other catalog surveyed answers on /mcp too: the cheahjs free-llm-api-resources docs site, whose tools search its documentation pages. The tools here return catalog rows with dates and an agent_usable flag. Note the precise claim: it is about catalogs. Some providers listed by these lists ship their own MCP servers, which is a different thing entirely.
It is re-checked by hand. 18 of 95 available offers last verified before 2026-09-09; median age 12 days as of 2026-10-09. If you need a provider's rate limit as it stands right now, read the provider's own documentation.
We publish the per-row dates precisely so you can judge that for yourself rather than take a freshness claim on trust — see which free AI APIs are still free.
Each of these does something we do not.
Capabilities were checked against each project's live site: its documentation, its published feeds if any, and a request to any endpoint it advertises.
Surveyed 2026-08-26; re-checked 2026-10-05. Next re-check due 2026-11-04. Every competitor claim was checked against that project's own live site on the survey date — not recalled, and not taken from a search summary. Figures about this catalog are computed from the published feeds at build time, so they cannot drift from the data they describe.
Cite the docs site, never the GitHub repo. Search results describe cheahjs/free-llm-api-resources as the best-known repo in this space, but api.github.com/repos/cheahjs/free-llm-api-resources and the raw README both returned 404 on 2026-08-26, while raw.githubusercontent.com served two other repos fine in the same run — so the repo is gone, not bot-blocked. The docs site returns 200 and the project is live.
The host is wotai.co. An earlier revision of this file recorded wotai.dev, which does not resolve — and the resulting proxy failure was published here as 'unreachable from our container, our network'. It was a non-existent hostname, not a network block. Corrected 2026-08-26 after a re-test with controls: wotai.co resolves to 216.150.1.1 and returns 200 from this container.
Comparisons were checked by a peer worker against each project's own live site on the survey date below.