Last updated: March 26, 2026
Best Free LLM APIs
Free tiers are a great way to test, prototype, and run small projects without spending money. Here's an honest breakdown of which ones are actually worth using.
Google Gemini (Free Tier)
FreeThe most generous free tier of any major LLM provider. Gemini 2.0 Flash gives you 15 requests per minute, 1 million tokens per day, and 1,500 requests per day — enough for serious development and even moderate production workloads.
DeepSeek V3
FreeIncredibly generous free tiers for both V3 (reasoning) and R1 (reasoning). V3 gives 1M tokens/day, R1 gives 2M tokens/day. At $0.0001/1K tokens when you do pay, it's the cheapest option for production.
Groq
Free TierThe fastest inference speeds in the industry, with a free tier that gives you 14,400 tokens/min and 30 requests/min. Great for real-time applications where latency matters.
Other Notable Free Tiers
OpenAI (Free Credits)
$5 in free credits for new API users. GPT-4o mini is inexpensive after that. Best for general-purpose use.
OpenAI →Anthropic (Trial Credits)
$5 in free credits for new users. Claude is best-in-class for long-form reasoning and coding.
Anthropic →Mistral AI
Small models free on La Plateforme. Good for European data residency and multilingual.
Mistral →Together AI
$5 free credits for new users. Excellent for running open-source models like Llama 4 and Qwen.
Together →Next step after free tiers
If a provider looks promising here, validate it against the full comparison and the paid guide before building deeper around it.