Not wanting to hand over a credit card is a perfectly good reason to be picky. These LLM APIs all let you start with no card and stay free within their limits. Every figure here is verified against the provider’s official source.
The no-card shortlist
- Google AI Studio (Gemini) free tier — capable Gemini and Gemma models, every supported region, per-model rate limits. The best all-rounder.
- Groq free tier — extremely fast inference on open models like Llama.
- OpenRouter free models — 50 free-model requests/day (20/min) across a rotating catalogue, one API.
- Cohere trial API keys — up to 1,000 calls/month, great for embeddings and reranking.
- Hugging Face Inference credits — a small monthly credit across many routed providers.
When you’ll eventually need a card
No-card free tiers are rate-limited. If you outgrow them, the next step is usually a cloud trial credit — Google Cloud ($300), AWS (up to $200) or Azure ($200) — which give a bigger budget but require a payment method for verification.
Filter the full directory to no-card offers on the homepage to see everything currently available.