A Field Guide to Actually-Free LLM APIs

What it does

This repository is a curated awesome-list tracking LLM providers and inference hosts that offer permanent or trial free tiers. It catalogs base URLs, rate limits, context windows, and model modalities for each endpoint, with direct links to API key signup pages. Most entries are OpenAI SDK-compatible, so swapping base_url and api_key is usually enough to start calling models.

The interesting bit

The real value is the legwork. The author has already parsed the fine print to separate genuinely free tiers from time-bombed trial credits, flagged non-commercial restrictions, and noted where your prompts might be fed back into training data. It is essentially a terms-of-service speedrun for the budget-conscious developer.

Key highlights

• Covers both first-party APIs (Google Gemini, DeepSeek, Mistral) and third-party inference hosts (Groq, Cerebras, Cloudflare Workers AI, GitHub Models).
• Every entry includes base URL, context length, max output, modality, and rate limits in a uniform table.
• Flags important gotchas: credit expiration dates, geographic restrictions, and data-use policies.
• Most endpoints advertise OpenAI SDK compatibility, lowering the friction for switching providers.
• Includes specialized providers like Aion Labs for roleplay and Cohere for embeddings/reranking.

Caveats

• Several “free” tiers are actually time-limited trials: DeepSeek credits expire after 30 days, and AI21 credits expire in three months.
• Usage restrictions vary by provider; Cohere’s trial is non-commercial only, and Gemini’s free tier is blocked in the EU, UK, and Switzerland.
• Multiple providers—including DeepSeek, Mistral, and Google—note that free-tier prompts may be used to train or improve models.

Verdict

Worth bookmarking if you’re building prototypes, testing agents, or running low-volume inference and want to avoid billing surprises. Skip it if you need guaranteed SLAs, high rate limits, or a programmatic API router—this is a reference page, not infrastructure.