No list can tell you an offer is free right now. It can only tell you when it last looked. Ours: 77 of 95 available offers were checked in the last 30 days, 18 more than 30 days ago, and the oldest on 2026-08-23. 15 offers that ended or were never free stay listed with their dates.
| Since its last check | Available offers |
|---|---|
| ≤ 7 days | 47 |
| 8–30 days | 30 |
| 31–60 days | 18 |
| > 60 days | 0 |
The answers most in need of a fresh look, oldest first.
Kept, dated, because "no" is an answer too.
Most lists of free AI APIs answer the question "was this free at some point". The question you actually have is "is it free now" — and no page can answer that, including this one. What a page can do is tell you when it last looked, and let you decide whether that is recent enough.
A title year tells you when the page was written, not when any particular entry was checked. Offers move much faster than that. gemini-2.0-flash retired within nine days of being catalogued here. GitHub Models entered a retirement brownout. Together removed its free serverless models. Cerebras turned a no-card free tier into a card-gated 30-day trial — with the per-minute limits unchanged, which is exactly the kind of change a page-level date hides.
So this catalog dates every row: 111 of 111 carry a verified_at, and it is on the row, in the table, and in the JSON feed.
This is the part most comparison pages leave out, and it is the whole argument of this one:
> 18 of 95 available offers last verified before 2026-09-09; median age 12 days as of 2026-10-09.
That is this catalog's own backlog, published rather than hidden. It is also why this site never ranks itself against anyone on freshness: that comparison would go against us, and a catalog that misrepresents its own age is worse than one that is simply old.
The date is on the row so that you never have to take our word for the age of a claim. A row checked yesterday and a row checked six weeks ago look different here, because they are different.
16 of 111 rows are marked non-available — retired, never had a free tier, or unverified — and they stay in the catalog, dated, rather than being deleted.
A negative is a dated answer. "This provider had no free tier when we checked, on this date" is information; deleting the row throws it away and leaves the next reader to rediscover it. At least one other catalog explicitly culls dead tiers, which makes it tidier and less useful for this particular question.
Worth being exact, because it is easy to blur and we would rather say it than be caught at it:
dated. They are not called. We hold no credential for most of these services.
request is dated. That is a different surface, api-health.json, and it is covered on free public APIs with no key.
Every row links the provider's own page (111 of 111), so the primary source is always one click away.
Gemini API free tier (AI Studio) · GLM Flash models ($0) · Model Studio new-user free quota · La Plateforme Free mode · Trial (evaluation) API keys · Complimentary daily tokens (data-sharing) · GroqCloud Free Plan · Cerebras Inference free tier · SambaNova Cloud Free Tier + $5 credit · OpenRouter :free model variants · Workers AI free daily neurons · NIM / build.nvidia.com developer credits · Inference Providers monthly credits · Fireworks $1 starter credit · Novita new-user trial voucher · Ternary Bonsai 27B free serverless model · OpenRouter for Startups · Tavily Researcher plan · Exa free tier · Serper new-user queries · Brave Search API monthly credit · Jina Reader/Search free tokens · Firecrawl free plan · Voyage AI free token allowance · Mixedbread Starter credits · Pinecone Starter plan · Qdrant Cloud free cluster · Weaviate Cloud free tier · Upstash Redis free tier · Supabase Free plan (Postgres + pgvector) · AssemblyAI signup credits · Deepgram signup credit · ElevenLabs free plan · LangSmith Developer plan · Langfuse Cloud Hobby plan · Braintrust Starter plan · E2B Hobby tier · Modal Starter plan · GitHub Codespaces included hours · Google Cloud $300 trial (Vertex AI) · Ramp Router · Ramp Rewards — Perplexity Enterprise Pro 50% off · Ramp Rewards — Factory 60M tokens · Ramp Rewards — OpenAI API credits · OpenRouter — $10 credits unlock 1000 free requests/day · Google Colab free tier GPU · Hugging Face Spaces ZeroGPU · GPT-5.6 Sol promotional API pricing · AI Gateway free tier · Kaggle Notebooks free GPU/TPU quota · Lightning AI free tier — registration credits (no card) · Lightning AI — remaining 25 credits, unlocked by adding a card · Together AI Startup Accelerator · OpenRouter — 50% off GPT-5.6 Sol routes · BazaarLink free gateway tier · Solar Pro 4 launch discount (90% then 70%) · AI21 Jamba free trial · Ollama Cloud free plan · OpenCode Zen free models · OVHcloud AI Endpoints anonymous tier · Nebius Builder Program credits · OpenAI Codex for Open Source · Anthropic Claude for Open Source · Ling 3.1 Flash on OpenRouter · Apodex 1.1 Mini (free) on OpenRouter · Ling 3.0 Flash Sante (free) on OpenRouter · Dots3-Note Preview (free) on OpenRouter · LFM2.5-2.6B (free) on OpenRouter · Nemotron 3.5 Lightning (free) on OpenRouter · Inkling Small (free) on OpenRouter · Laguna S 2.1 (free) on OpenRouter · Inkling (free) on OpenRouter · Laguna XS 2.1 (free) on OpenRouter · North Mini Code (free) on OpenRouter · Nemotron 3.5 Content Safety (free) on OpenRouter · Nemotron 3 Ultra (free) on OpenRouter · Nemotron 3 Nano Omni (free) on OpenRouter · Gemma 4 26B A4B (free) on OpenRouter · Gemma 4 31B (free) on OpenRouter · Nemotron 3 Super (free) on OpenRouter · Inference.net Pay as you go plan · Scaleway Generative APIs free tier · Pollinations free Pollen from Quests · Replicate free runs on select models · SiliconFlow $1 free credit · Baseten new-account credits · ModelScope API-Inference (free for registered users) · NLP Cloud $15 free credit · LLM7.io free API token · Kilo AI Gateway free models (no key) · Aion Labs free tier · Nous Portal free plan (free models only) · Routeway Starter Free plan · Requesty free plan (free models) · Ling 3.0 Flash Sante (free) on Novita
> 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.
Each of these does something we do not.
Per-entry dating was checked by looking for a date attached to individual entries on each project's live site, as against a single date for the whole page.
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.