Free AI API rate limits, compared: which free tiers can do real work and which are demo taps
A free tier is only as good as its rate limit, and rate limits are the field providers least want to print in big type. We track them as structured data across 45 providers: 22 have a free tier of some kind, and the limits range from '~40 requests per minute, no daily cap' to '$0.10 of credit per month'. This article puts the whole picture side by side with the numbers our catalog actually carries, including the places where it carries none — because honesty about missing data is more useful than a guessed number. If you just want the maintained filter, the free-tier hub is the live view; this post is the snapshot plus the nuance the table alone cannot carry: tier versus free-model nuance, what a 'request' even means on each provider, and which limits actually block real work.
Free models versus free tiers — the tier nuance most posts skip
A provider can be free in two different shapes. A free tier is an account-level allowance that applies to the provider's own models (Google AI Studio's daily quota, NVIDIA NIM's 40 RPM, Groq's 30 RPM). A free-model pool is a set of third-party or open models the provider lets you call for free inside an otherwise paid platform (OpenRouter's 50 requests/day on its rotating free-model set, OpenCode Zen's 5 free models). The distinction matters because it changes what you can route where. A free tier follows your credentials; a free-model pool follows the model list, which rotates. On OpenRouter, your 50 requests/day can be spent on any model the provider currently marks free — but Claude, for example, is explicitly excluded from that pool. On OpenCode, you get 5 free models, but which five changes periodically. When you build a router, treat free-model pools as opportunistic capacity, not as a stable API contract. Our catalog stores this difference in free_tier_model and rate_limits so the free-tier hub can surface it separately from a plain account quota.
One more nuance: card requirements. Some free lanes require a card on file (Mistral Le Chat, OpenCode) while others do not (OpenRouter base tier, NVIDIA NIM, Groq, Cloudflare Workers AI). We store requires_credit_card as its own boolean rather than folding it into 'free means free', because for many developers a no-card lane is the only lane they will actually try first. The plans table lets you filter by this field before you sign up.
The rate-limit table — every number we have, and where we have none
| Provider | Free limit | Card required? | Realistic use |
|---|---|---|---|
| NVIDIA NIM | ~40 requests/min, no daily cap | No | Real work: sustained interactive use on a rotating model list |
| Google AI Studio | ~1,500 requests/day on the free endpoint | No | Real work: a full day of scripting, rotating model lineup |
| Groq | 30 requests/min; 1K to 14.4K requests/day depending on model | No | Genuinely fast lanes, but the daily cap swings hard by model |
| Kilo Code | 200 requests/hour with sign-in | No | Real work inside a coding assistant; BYOK beyond it |
| Cloudflare Workers AI | 10K neurons/day, 300 requests/min | No | Decent burst capacity; 'neurons' are Cloudflare's own metering unit |
| OpenRouter | 50 requests/day on free models; $10 of PAYG credit raises it to 1,000/day | No for the base tier | Light daily use; the $10 unlock is the best-value move on this list |
| Mistral Le Chat | Base-tier messages, web search, libraries, and image generation | Yes | Daily-driver chat subject to fair use; the API is a separate paid lane |
| OpenCode | 5 free models on OpenCode Zen; per-model limits rotate | Yes | A finite promotional tier; check the current model set first |
| Cline | Hosted free models with per-model limits that rotate | No | Useful in the editor; BYOK when you hit a wall |
| Ollama | Local: unlimited. Cloud free tier: 1 concurrent model | No | Local is the only truly unlimited lane on this list |
| OpenAI Codex | Free with a ChatGPT account; the 1x tier is ~20 messages per 5-hour window | Yes | A taste of the agent, not a workload |
| OVHcloud AI Endpoints | 2 requests/min per IP without a key; 400 requests/min with a paid key | No for the IP lane | 2 requests/min is a health check, not an app |
| SiliconFlow | 100 requests/day plus $1 in credit | No | Evaluation of specific models |
| Hugging Face | ~$0.10 of inference credit per month ($2 on PRO) | No | The smallest allowance we track; demo-only by design |
The seven we classify as usable, and the closest miss
In the catalog we flag a free tier as 'meaningful' when sustained real use is plausible under the published recurring limits. Seven of the 22 qualify: NVIDIA NIM, Google AI Studio, Mistral, Kilo Code, OpenCode, Cline, and OpenRouter. Look at the table and you can see why: those are the lanes with continuous allowances (per minute, per hour, or per day) rather than a one-time pile of credit that dies the first weekend you enjoy yourself. Groq is the closest miss, and it is instructive. Thirty requests per minute is generous — faster than most apps need — but the daily cap swings from 14.4K down to 1K depending on which model you pick. If you benchmark Groq on the high-cap model and then ship on the low-cap one, your production limit is one-fourteenth of what you tested. Plan around the model you actually want, not the headline number. The free-tier hub carries the current meaningful classification for all 22, and the provider directory links the source page for each limit so you can read the exact wording yourself.
The demo-only tier, and why we still track it
The rest are scoped as trials, and that is fine as long as you treat them that way. One-time grants: Hyperbolic hands you $1, Alibaba gives 1M free tokens per model for 90 days (plus 70M+ tokens for new accounts), BytePlus ModelArk offers 500K free tokens per LLM and 2M for vision models, and OVHcloud's $200 public-cloud trial credit can be pointed at AI Endpoints. These are excellent for benchmarking a provider you might pay later. They are not foundations for a product. One honest gap: GitHub Models and DeepSeek both run free lanes, but our catalog carries no hard numbers for either, so they are absent from the table rather than represented by invented ones. That is deliberate — the honest-absence rule says we would rather show a gap than a number we cannot source. If you rely on either free lane, treat the provider entry as your source until the provider publishes a hard limit.
What a 'request' means — and other fine print that changes the math
- On Cloudflare Workers AI the free unit is 'neurons' (10K/day), not requests — neurons map to compute rather than to calls, so a heavy prompt burns more neurons than a tiny one. The 300 RPM is a burst ceiling on top of that compute allowance.
- On OVHcloud the '2 requests/min per IP' lane is unauthenticated and per-IP, not per-account; the 400 RPM number requires a paid key. Don't average the two.
- On OpenAI Codex the '1x tier (~20 messages per 5-hour window)' is tied to a ChatGPT account, not an API key. It is a consumer-agent allowance measured in messages, not an API token allowance.
- On Groq and SiliconFlow the daily cap varies by model. Our catalog stores the range (Groq: 1K–14.4K/day) rather than a single number so you don't anchor on the best case.
- On Mistral's Le Chat and OpenCode Zen the 'per-model limits that rotate' note means the free model list itself changes — your code should handle 'model not available for free today' as a normal case, not an error.
The working pattern: hold several, route around exhaustion
The working pattern, as we keep saying on this blog, is not picking one free tier: it is holding several and routing around whichever one is exhausted. That is why our chat page is bring-your-own-key and browser-direct: your keys stay in your own vault, requests go straight from your browser to the provider, and leaving a provider costs one click. Put NVIDIA NIM and Groq behind your interactive loop, OpenRouter behind your batch jobs, Google AI Studio behind your long-context reasoning, and Kilo inside your editor. When one lane throttles, the others still have headroom. The free-tier hub is the maintained version of this article's table, and the pricing page covers what happens when you outgrow all of it — because eventually you will, and the cheapest paid step (often $10 in PAYG credit to unlock OpenRouter's 1,000/day free-model pool) is usually better value than another free account.