We re-verified all 25 offers in the directory against providers’ own pages on 10 October, and then had every change re-checked by an independent pass whose job was to prove it wrong. It was the biggest month of change since we launched, and the direction was mostly one way: free allowances getting smaller, vaguer or harder to reach. Two of the changes are corrections to things we told you.
What changed, at a glance
| Offer | What changed | Direction |
|---|---|---|
| Hugging Face | Free-account monthly credit ended (docs list “None” since 7 Oct) | Ended |
| Mistral | $10/month figure no longer published; Free mode continues, no card | Vaguer |
| Fireworks AI | $1 signup credit gone from its pricing page — listing unpublished | Ended |
| Claude Startups | Opened to bootstrapped startups 6 Oct; $1,000 offer now “over capacity” | Mixed |
| AWS Free Tier | Not documented as covering Claude (our correction); “most” need no card | Corrected |
| Card labels on seven offers | ”No card” → “not stated” where the provider never says it (our correction) | Corrected |
| NVIDIA NIM | 10,000/day removed (never shown to users); 40 RPM for most models | Corrected |
| DeepInfra DeepStart | Up to 1 billion → about 50 billion tokens; credits expire after a year | Bigger |
| Microsoft for Startups | Series B cap; starter amount disputed by Microsoft’s own pages | Narrower |
| Google Cloud $300 | Vertex AI renamed Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform; terms unchanged | Renamed |
| Gemini API free tier | Covers selected models only; 18+ | Clarified |
| Groq | Compound systems decommissioned 21 Sept; gpt-oss figures unchanged | Narrower |
The full, item-by-item record is in the change log.
The big one: Hugging Face’s free credit has ended
Hugging Face used to give every free account $0.10 a month of Inference Providers credit. On 7 October 2026 its documentation was changed so the pricing table reads “Free Users | None | - | yes (credits purchase required)”, and the page now says free users “can use Inference Providers by purchasing credits, or by upgrading to PRO”. The change is dated by Hugging Face’s own docs repository, in a commit titled “free users no longer get included monthly credits”. PRO ($9 a month) and Team/Enterprise seats still include $2.00 a month. We have marked the offer as ended rather than deleting it, so anyone who arrives looking for it finds out.
Two figures that vanished: Mistral and Fireworks
Mistral published “$10 /mo in API credits” for its Free plan in September — which is why we listed it. On 10 October that line was gone from its pricing page and from its documentation. Free mode itself is unchanged, and Mistral now says verbatim that “API access is enabled by default with no credit card required”, so the listing stays, without a number.
Fireworks no longer says “$1 in free credits” on its pricing page, which now reads “Simply add a payment method to buy credits”. A Fireworks blog post edited in September still mentions the $1 — the same post still lists Hugging Face’s $0.10 and Cerebras as free — so Fireworks’ own pages disagree about whether the credit exists. We do not publish a figure a provider contradicts, so the listing is held back until they agree.
Claude Startups opened up — then filled up
Anthropic expanded Claude Startups on 6 October: “The program is open to bootstrapped, pre-seed, and venture-backed startups”, with a one-time $1,000 API credit and a free year of Claude Team. Within days its programme page said: “we’re currently over capacity on the Claude Team and $1,000 API credit offers”, and that it would “re-review all applications”. Startups backed by a VC in Anthropic’s partner network “may be eligible to receive up to $100K in additional API credits, claimed through your VC”. The credits work only on the first-party API — Anthropic says they “can’t be used on AWS Bedrock, Google Cloud Vertex AI, or other third-party platforms”.
Our corrections
AWS and Claude. Since August we had described Amazon Bedrock, funded by AWS’s up-to-$200 new-account credits, as the documented cloud route to Claude. It is not documented. Claude on Bedrock is “offered and billed through AWS Marketplace”, and AWS’s promotional-credit terms say that “Unless authorized by us, Promotional Credit will not be applied to any fees or charges for … AWS Marketplace”. AWS does authorise it for its startup programme, AWS Activate; for the Free Tier it says nothing either way. We have corrected the Claude guide and every page that repeated the advice.
“No card”. Our directory showed a green “No card” for offers whose providers never actually say so — we had inferred it from the absence of a payment step, the same inference that failed on Cerebras in September. Seven offers now read “Card: not stated”: Google’s Gemini API free tier, Groq, Cohere, NVIDIA NIM, Stability AI, Leonardo.Ai and Claude Startups. “No card” now appears only where the provider says it in its own words.
NVIDIA. We listed NVIDIA’s free endpoints at “10,000 requests per day”. That string exists in NVIDIA’s page data, but no part of the page shows it to users, so it is not something NVIDIA tells you. NVIDIA’s help centre does say “up to 40 requests per minute (RPM) for most models”, which is now the headline.
The rest of the month
- AWS sign-up. AWS now says a payment method “isn’t required to sign up for most new customers”, though it may still ask and the new flow is a limited rollout. Its FAQ also gives two different expiry periods for the credits.
- Microsoft for Startups narrowed eligibility to pre-seed through Series B, and its own pages give two different starter amounts ($200 and $1,000). The up-to-$150,000 ceiling stands; Microsoft names Anthropic among the providers its credits do not cover.
- Google renamed Vertex AI to Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform — in April, which we caught late. The $300 credit and both of its generative-AI exclusions are unchanged. The Gemini API free tier covers selected models only, and Google’s startup credits do not cover third-party models.
- DeepInfra’s DeepStart grew to about 50 billion tokens, measured at DeepSeek V4 Flash prices, and the credits now expire a year after approval.
- Groq decommissioned its Compound systems on 21 September; the gpt-oss limits are unchanged.
- Two additions survived an independent re-check: Alibaba Cloud Model Studio (typically 1,000,000 free tokens per eligible model for 90 days, Singapore region only, payment method required) and Runway (125 one-time web-app credits, no credit card required, not usable on the API). Six other providers we checked — Hyperbolic, Novita, Chutes, Recraft, Segmind and a DeepInfra partner offer — had nothing we could publish yet.
What still works
Free, ongoing, and verified on 10 October:
- Gemini API free tier — Gemini 3.8 Flash, Gemini 2.5 Pro, Gemma 4 and more.
- Groq Free plan — 30 requests a minute, 1,000 a day on gpt-oss-120b.
- OpenRouter free models — 50 requests a day, 1,000 after buying $10 of credits; no payment method needed.
- Cloudflare Workers AI — 10,000 Neurons a day; no credit card.
- Mistral Free mode — no credit card.
- NVIDIA NIM — up to 40 requests a minute for most models.
Plus the student offers (Azure for Students, the GitHub Student Developer Pack, JetBrains) and the startup programmes, all on the directory.
The takeaway
This month Hugging Face ended a free allowance outright, Fireworks’ pricing page dropped its signup credit, Groq shut down two free models, and Mistral stopped publishing its number. Add September’s Cerebras and the July retirement of GitHub Models, and the pattern of the last quarter is hard to miss: free allowances are getting smaller, and the figures behind them harder to pin down. The free tiers that remain are real and useful — but check the date on any number before you build on it, including ours. We have written up the quarter’s evidence, with its limits, in free AI API tiers narrowed in 2026.