Top 30 Free LLM APIs 2026: Real Credits, Rate Limits & Signup Guide

🔥 Top 10 Ranking

Ranked by free credit size, model quality, geographic access, and open-source status. Every provider shows real free-tier numbers — no "7-day trial" word games.

1. 1
   DeepSeek 🇨🇳 China-Direct 🔓 Open-Source 🆓 Free API

   API credits: $5 Web app: 50 requests/day

   DeepSeek is a leading Chinese AI lab offering high-performance open-source LLMs. April 2026 V4 release: V4-Pro (1.6T par…

   View details → Official site ↗
2. 2
   Ollama 🔓 Open-Source 🆓 Free API

   API credits: Unlimited Web app: Unlimited (runs locally)

   Ollama is a local LLM runner. Run any open-source model with one command. Completely free, no internet needed, supports …

   View details → Official site ↗
3. 3
   Jina AI 🔓 Open-Source 🆓 Free API

   API credits: 1M free tokens for new users. Web app: 1M free tokens on signup.

   Multimodal embeddings, reranker, and reader API platform serving jina-embeddings-v3 and related models. 1M free tokens f…

   View details → Official site ↗
4. 4
   NVIDIA Build (NIM API) 🆓 Free API

   API credits: 无限制（已取消额度限制） Web app: Unlimited (40 RPM rate limit)

   NVIDIA Build is the most underrated free AI API platform. 100+ top models completely free, no credit card, no quota limi…

   View details → Official site ↗
5. 5
   FireRed-OpenStoryline 🇨🇳 China-Direct 🔓 Open-Source 🆓 Free API

   API credits: Unlimited self-hosted Web app: Open-source self-hosting with no fixed usage limit

   FireRed-OpenStoryline is an open-source AI video editing agent that turns manual editing into natural-language directing…

   View details → Official site ↗
6. 6
   Qwen (Alibaba) 🇨🇳 China-Direct 🔓 Open-Source 🆓 Free API

   API credits: 7000 万 tokens（新用户一次性；DashScope/Bailian 控制台为准） Web app: 70M DashScope/Bailian signup tokens; RPM/TPM, expiry, and model access vary by account

   Quick answer: Qwen API gives new Alibaba Cloud Bailian/DashScope users 70M signup tokens, an OpenAI-compatible setup pat…

   View details → Official site ↗
7. 7
   Cloudflare Workers AI 🆓 Free API

   API credits: 每天 10000 神经元（永久有效） Web app: 10,000 free requests/day

   Cloudflare Workers AI is Cloudflare's edge AI inference platform. $5/mo Workers plan includes 10,000 free AI calls per d…

   View details → Official site ↗
8. 8
   Kimi (Moonshot AI) 🇨🇳 China-Direct 🆓 Free API

   API credits: ¥15 + 充 $5 送 $5 Web app: No explicit limit

   Kimi is an AI assistant by Moonshot AI, known for ultra-long context. Latest K2.5 is MoE architecture with 1M context, m…

   View details → Official site ↗
9. 9
   DGX Cloud Lepton (formerly Lepton AI) 🆓 Free API

   API credits: $10 free credits Web app: 10M tokens/day

   Lepton AI was founded by Yangqing Jia (PyTorch co-creator) and acquired by NVIDIA in March 2025. Relaunched as DGX Cloud…

   View details → Official site ↗
10. 10
    LM Studio 🆓 Free API

    API credits: Unlimited Web app: Unlimited (runs locally)

    LM Studio is a local LLM runner with a graphical interface. One-click download and run open-source models, completely fr…

    View details → Official site ↗

⚡ 3-Minute Quickstart

Almost every modern LLM API is OpenAI-compatible. Just swap the base_url and api_key:

from openai import OpenAI

# Any OpenAI-compatible provider works this way
client = OpenAI(
    api_key="YOUR_API_KEY",                   # From the provider console
    base_url="https://api.deepseek.com/v1"   # Swap per provider
)

response = client.chat.completions.create(
    model="deepseek-chat",
    messages=[{"role": "user", "content": "Hello"}]
)
print(response.choices[0].message.content)

Common base_url cheat-sheet:

• https://api.deepseek.com/v1 — DeepSeek ($5 signup, China-direct)
• https://api.siliconflow.cn/v1 — SiliconFlow (30+ free models, China-direct)
• https://open.bigmodel.cn/api/paas/v4 — Zhipu ChatGLM (GLM-4-Flash free forever)
• https://dashscope.aliyuncs.com/compatible-mode/v1 — Alibaba Qwen
• https://api.groq.com/openai/v1 — Groq (fastest inference)
• https://openrouter.ai/api/v1 — OpenRouter (300+ models aggregated)

🔓 Best Open-Source Models

If you want models you can also run locally:

• DeepSeek $5
• Ollama Unlimited
• Jina AI 1M free tokens for new users.
• FireRed-OpenStoryline Unlimited self-hosted
• Qwen (Alibaba) 7000 万 tokens（新用户一次性；DashScope/Bailian 控制台为准）
• Grok (xAI) $25/月
• MiniMax ¥15
• llama.cpp Self-hosted
• vLLM Self-hosted OpenAI-compatible API; no vendor credits required.
• TextGen $0

📊 Free Tier Comparison

❓ FAQ