Free plans (5)
Their limits are stated in different terms, so they aren't ranked against each other. Ordered by first paid price.
| Tool | Stated limits | What makes you upgrade | First paid price | Kind |
|---|---|---|---|---|
 Hugging Face Inference ProvidersRead Oct 29, 2026 |
Free Hub account with unlimited public models, datasets and apps; CPU Basic and ZeroGPU Spaces hardware listed as FREE"Host and collaborate on unlimited public models, datasets and applications."Source | Not stated | $9/moPRO | Free plan |
 Azure OpenAI ServiceRead Nov 8, 2026 |
Azure free services: 65+ always-free services with monthly free amounts, plus 20+ services free for 12 months for new customers. Beyond free amounts, pay as you go rates apply."Free monthly amounts of 65+ always-free services"Source | Not stated | $260/moProvisioned (PTUs), reservation, Global | Free plan |
 Cloudflare Workers AIRead Oct 29, 2026 |
10,000 Neurons per day free; beyond that, upgrade to Workers Paid"Our free allocation allows anyone to use a total of 10,000 Neurons per day at no charge."Source | Beyond that, upgrade to Workers Paid | $0.011/1,000 Neurons | Free plan |
 Google Gemini APIRead Oct 29, 2026 |
Free tier with free input and output tokens, limited access to certain models, and Google AI Studio access; content is used to improve Google products. Some models (Gemini 4 Argon, Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview) are not available on the free tier."Start building free of charge with generous limits, then scale up with prepaid and pay-as-you-go pricing for your production-ready applications."Source | Not stated | $0.30/1M input tokens | Free plan |
 Google Vertex AIRead Oct 29, 2026 |
Agent Compute includes 50 free hours, Agent Memory 100 free GiB-hours, and Agent Storage 1 GiB-month free per month per account; paid rates apply after."0 hour to 50 hour $0.00 (Free) / 1 hour, per 1 month / account"Source | Not stated | $0.085/vCPU-hour | Free plan |
Free trial only (3)
- Baseten: New accounts come with free credits; duration not stated
- Cerebras Inference: One-time $5 promotional credit, expires 30 days after activation
- DigitalOcean Gradient AI: $5 free credit valid for 90 days (example given)
Questions
Which AI API platforms are free?
5 have a free plan you can keep, including Azure OpenAI Service, Cloudflare Workers AI, Google Gemini API, Google Vertex AI, Hugging Face Inference Providers.
What do you pay after a free plan?
The lowest first paid price among tools with a free plan is $9/mo (Hugging Face Inference Providers). Read from each vendor's own page.
How this page is made
Every limit is the vendor's own, read from its pages and quoted. A tool counts as a free plan when the text describes something you can keep using; a fixed number of days or a single batch of credits is listed separately. We don't test the plans. How prices are read.