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Free LLM Today

Free LLM APIs with no credit card

Only providers whose own page states that the free tier starts without a card or a purchase are listed as confirmed. The rest are shown as what they are: not stated.

Confirmed: no card needed (2)

Free LLM APIs confirmed to start without a credit card
ProviderCard to startFree allowanceRequests / minRequests / day
Google Gemini APIFree tier
Not required

The Free tier qualifies with an “Active project or free trial”; no billing tier is involved.

Not published

Limits are per project and shown only inside Google AI Studio.

Not published

Not published per model: “Rate limits … can be viewed in Google AI Studio.”

Not published

Not published per model: “Rate limits … can be viewed in Google AI Studio.”

OpenRouterFree tier
Not required

The 50 req/day ceiling applies to accounts that bought fewer than 10 credits, so no purchase is needed.

20 req/min · 50 req/day

1,000 req/day once the account has bought at least 10 credits.

20

All free model variants together.

50

1,000/day once the account has bought at least 10 credits.

22 of 24 cells above were read on the provider’s own page in the last 30 days (oldest check: ). Each check mark opens that page. The other 2 say “not verified” instead of repeating a number from someone else’s article.

Confirmed: a payment method is required (1)

Confirmed: a payment method is required
ProviderCard to startFree allowanceRequests / minRequests / day
CerebrasTrial only
Required

Credits are granted “after adding a verified payment method”.

$5 trial credit, 30 days

Granted “after adding a verified payment method”.

5

Free Trial: gpt-oss-120b and qwen-3.8-27b.

Not published

The Free Trial table lists no requests-per-day figure.

The official page does not say (4)

For these providers, the pages we read on the date shown in each entry say nothing about a card at sign-up. That is not a yes: open the provider entry and its sign-up page before you count on it.

What to check before you rely on it

“No card” and “no cost” are different promises

A provider that asks for no card cannot bill you, so the worst case is a refused request. A provider that asks for a card and grants credits, as Cerebras does with its $5 trial, can start charging when the credits end or expire. Read which of the two you are signing up for.

What happens at the limit

Past a free allowance you need a paid plan or purchased credits. Cloudflare requires the Workers Paid plan above 10,000 Neurons a day. Hugging Face requires a credits purchase after the monthly $0.10. On OpenRouter, buying 10 credits once lifts the daily ceiling of free models from 50 to 1,000 requests.

A phone number or an existing account may still be required

“No card” says nothing about other checks. The Gemini API needs a Google account and is offered only in the countries Google lists, to people aged 18 or over. NVIDIA NIM requires joining the NVIDIA Developer Program. See commercial use for what you may build once you are in.

Questions and answers

Which free LLM APIs work without a credit card?

Confirmed on the provider’s own page on 3 Oct 2026: Google Gemini API (the Free tier qualifies with an active project or free trial, with no billing tier) and OpenRouter (the 50 requests/day ceiling applies to accounts that bought fewer than 10 credits). For Groq, Cloudflare Workers AI, Hugging Face and NVIDIA NIM, the pages we read do not say either way.

Does Cerebras need a card?

Yes. Its rate-limits page says the $5 trial credits are granted after adding a verified payment method, and they expire 30 days later.

If a provider does not ask for a card, can it still charge me?

Not without a payment method on file. Going past a free allowance needs a paid plan or purchased credits: Cloudflare requires Workers Paid above 10,000 Neurons a day, and Hugging Face requires a credits purchase once the monthly credit is spent.

Why is “no card” not marked for every provider?

Because we only mark what an official page states. Several sign-up flows probably work without a card, but a documentation page that says so is the only thing we count as a check.

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