Not wanting to hand over a credit card is a perfectly good reason to be picky — and it is exactly where free-tier listings tend to overclaim. “No card” usually means “nobody mentioned a card”, which is not the same thing. So this list is strict: an offer is here only if its provider says, in its own words, that no card is needed. Everything below is checked against the provider’s own pages, and each offer page quotes the sentence.
Providers that say no card is needed
- OpenRouter free models — 50 free-model requests a day (20 a minute), 1,000 a day once you have bought $10 of credits. OpenRouter says its Free plan “works without a payment method”.
- Mistral Free mode — the default for new accounts: “API access is enabled by default with no credit card required.” Mistral no longer publishes how much usage Free mode includes. This applies to personal Free mode; the organisation setup has separate billing requirements.
- Cloudflare Workers AI — 10,000 Neurons a day on the Free plan, resetting at 00:00 UTC. Cloudflare: “Start building for free — no credit card required.” Eight listed models require paid billing and are excluded from that free route.
Students have three more: Azure for Students ($100 for 12 months — “A credit card is not required”), the GitHub Student Developer Pack ($100 Azure credit, “no credit card required”) and JetBrains’ student licence (3 AI Credits every 30 days — “No card required”).
Free, but the provider doesn’t say
These are genuinely free and very good — they just never state the card question, so we mark it “not stated” rather than guess:
- Google’s Gemini API free tier — selected Gemini and Gemma models; Google lists the only qualification as an “Active project or free trial”.
- Groq’s Free plan — 30 requests a minute on gpt-oss; Groq asks for a payment method “to upgrade from the Free tier to the Developer tier”.
- Cohere trial keys — 1,000 API calls a month, issued on sign-up.
Hugging Face’s monthly credit used to belong here; since 7 October 2026 its docs list none for free accounts.
Check usage limits separately from payment rules
No-card access does not remove rate limits, model exclusions or data-use terms. Compare RPM, TPM and reset periods, and use the API directory for the current product list. Do not treat a web-app credit or chat subscription as an API allowance.
When you may need a payment method
Free tiers are rate-limited. If you outgrow them, the next step is usually a cloud trial credit — Google Cloud ($300) or Azure ($200), both of which require a payment method, or AWS (up to $200), which now says most new customers can sign up without one but may ask for it.
Filter the full directory to No card in the homepage catalogue: it shows only offers whose provider says so.