Can you use OpenAI API for free

LongCat is Meituan's large model API platform (longcat.chat/platform), offering OpenAI/Anthropic-compatible endpoints. During its public beta phase in 2026, it provides generous daily free token allowances for models including LongCat-Flash and LongCat-2.0, with a context window of 131K tokens.

Free during public beta: initial ~5M tokens/day (per API changelog), activity can raise it up to ~120M/day; ~$150/mo equivalent at blended $1/1M tokens. Phone signup, key in ~3 min; paid top-ups not yet supported.

Hajimi API (api.gemai.cc) is a Chinese third-party relay aggregation platform. It specializes in routing requests to Claude, Gemini, and GPT models through a unified OpenAI-compatible endpoint, primarily catering to users requiring simplified access to international models.

New users get 100 units of balance by default (community figure ~¥500 (≈$74.39)), QQ-email signup only; there is a daily check-in farming crowd; 'limited perk' zero-priced models can be delisted anytime.

AnyRouter is a third-party relay that forwards Claude Code and OpenAI Codex traffic through an Anthropic- and OpenAI-compatible endpoint at https://anyrouter.top. Registration is via GitHub or LinuxDO, and the official docs advertise a $50 free credit on signup with no credit card required, plus $50 for each side on a successful referral. Rates are expressed as billing multipliers rather than an open price list - the docs recommend Claude 4 Sonnet for routine work because it bills at one fifth of Claude 4 Opus. Dated notices track model availability (GPT 6 on 2026-09-05, GPT 5.5 on 2026-05-26) alongside a documented record of attacks, abuse-driven registration freezes and a one-day outage.

docs.anyrouter.top states the signup grant as $50 free credit with no credit card required, plus $50 for each party on a successful referral (registration notice on anyrouter.top, fetched 2026-09-16).

Cerebras Inference offers ultra-fast AI inference powered by its Wafer-Scale Engine (WSE-3) technology, achieving record-breaking speeds up to 3000 tokens/s. The official API is OpenAI-compatible and features a generous free tier alongside professional pay-as-you-go access.

Free tier ≈1M tokens/day (resets UTC 00:00, no card, no waitlist) → ≈$30/mo blended at $1/1M; 8K context cap; RPM reported 5–30 by different sources. Paid dev tier from $10.

xAI (founded by Elon Musk) offers the official API for the Grok series of LLMs. Known for leading benchmarks in coding and reasoning, the Grok-4.6 flagship model is available via an OpenAI-compatible API, featuring low-latency inference and high agentic tool-calling capabilities.

No permanent free tier; ~$25 promo credit on signup (30-day expiry, varies by region/promotion). $150/mo data-sharing credits still listed by 2026 guides despite mid-2025 end reports — rely on what the console shows.

Feifeimiao (api.feifeimiao.top) is a Chinese third-party relay service offering an OpenAI-compatible API gateway. Built on the New-API framework, it aggregates various models and focuses on providing access to tools like Codex and Claude Code for developers in the region.

$10 trial credit on signup; promotional $20 weekly-limited cards for new and existing users (weekly expiry). The core is paid subscriptions (Small ¥60 (≈$8.93)/30d ≈ $20/day, Medium ¥150 (≈$22.32)/30d ≈ $60/day).

Lightning AI (LitAI) provides a unified gateway to frontier models through an OpenAI-compatible API. New users receive 40 million free tokens (approx. $15 in credits) to test models like Claude, GPT, and Gemini. Usage beyond the initial credit is billed as pay-as-you-go.

~30M free tokens per user per month (~15 credits = $15 value), no card required; credits refresh monthly and expire if unused; plus 1 free 4-CPU Studio and 10GB Drive.

FreeModel is a multi-model gateway that intelligently routes requests to the best-performing open models. It supports both OpenAI and Anthropic API formats and provides automatic model fallback and smart provider selection to optimize for quality.

Signup credits land instantly, no card. Community reports conflict: $10 signup credit (phone/Telegram verify) up to claims of ~$66/week (~$300 cumulative) - authenticity unconfirmed. Conservative: $10.

Helyx markets itself as a unified OpenAI-compatible API gateway for frontier models (Claude Opus 5, Claude Haiku 4.5, GPT-5.4 Nano, Gemini, Kimi, DeepSeek) claiming 50+ models behind one endpoint, with a published rate card of five active models including DeepSeek-V4 Pro at $0.400 in / $0.750 out per 1M tokens (50% off its $0.800/$1.50 list) and MiniMax M3 at $0.300/$1.200. Signup is Google or GitHub with no password, and the account is credited with $10.000000 free: $2.000000 instantly plus $8.000000 released on request. Paid top-ups are crypto-only (USDT, USDC, BTC, ETH, TRON) and every deposit is doubled ($5 pays $10 credit, $25 pays $50), with credits stated to never expire and no subscriptions or daily caps. The domain in this listing, helyx.ai, is dead - it returns a 404 DEPLOYMENT_NOT_FOUND from Vercel - and the live Helyx AI site is served from helyxai.space.

$10.000000 signup credit ($2.000000 instant, $8.000000 released on request) as stated on the helyxai.space homepage and pricing page; the $10 figure is the operator's own published grant, not a conversion.

Upstage Console provides an OpenAI-compatible API for their high-performance Solar models. It features a developer-friendly $10 signup credit and commitment-based tiers for businesses requiring higher rate limits and support.

One-time $10 credit valid for 3 months for new signups.

FreeTheAi is a free OpenAI-compatible API gateway aggregating 80+ models behind a single base URL. It operates via Discord-based key signup and daily check-ins, emphasizing persistent free access for developers and roleplay users without credit card requirements.

Fully free, no card; daily /checkin (key validation + human challenge) required before calls. Default cap 250 successful calls/day (role-based bumps) ~ $7.5/mo equivalent at ~1K tokens/call, $1/1M tokens.

Inception Labs offers a cloud inference platform for its in-house diffusion-based LLMs, such as Mercury 2 and Mercury Coder. Designed for extreme efficiency, it provides an OpenAI-compatible API that significantly undercuts GPU-based inference costs while maintaining high reasoning quality.

Free plan ≈10M tokens, officially described as ~$7–10 of credit (low end counted), no card; self-serve key at platform.inceptionlabs.ai; then PAYG (Mercury 2 ~$0.25/1M in, $0.75–1.00/1M out).

Requesty is an AI model gateway and router that aggregates over 600 models (Claude, GPT, Gemini, DeepSeek) through a single OpenAI-compatible API. It offers cost optimization, unified billing, and advanced routing features for enterprise and individual developers.

Free tier: 200 requests/day plus ~$6 signup credits (some sources say $10; conservative low end), no card required; beyond that Pro is pay-as-you-go at model cost +5%.

EasyMax (Easy API) is a multi-model aggregation gateway compatible with OpenAI and Claude API protocols. It focuses on stability and pricing, supporting GPT, Gemini, and image generation models. Details were checked against the provider's own page at easymax.ai.

Relay with ~5-8 free model entries on /api/pricing; V2EX promo grants $5 trial credit for forum reply (one-time, promotional). Continuous free quota limited; low-cost paid top-ups.

FreeModel is a frontier model API router that provides a single, unified endpoint for top-tier models like GPT-5 and Claude Code. It features intelligent routing to optimize for output quality and cost, supporting OpenAI-compatible SDKs for seamless developer integration.

Official site: free plan '永久免费·无需信用卡' (forever free, no CC) incl. '注册即送 $5 API 额度' ($5 signup credit) + FRE-5.4/5.5 models. Community reported a $300 signup promo (May 2026, likely expired). OpenAI+Anthropic compatible.

InternLM (Shanghai AI Laboratory) provides an open platform with an OpenAI-compatible API. It offers a monthly free token allowance for its InternVL and long-thinking reasoning models. Details were checked against the provider's own page at internlm.intern-ai.org.cn.

Community users: ~1M input + 3M output tokens free per month (~10 RPM, keys valid 6 months) ≈ $5/mo at $0.5 in / $1.5 out per 1M; monthly usage visible in console under API Usage.

Nscale's Serverless Inference is an OpenAI-compatible endpoint service for open models - the catalogue pages list Meta Llama 4 Scout, Alibaba Qwen, DeepSeek, OpenAI GPT OSS 20B/120B, Mistral 8x22B Instruct, FLUX.1 [schnell] and Stable Diffusion XL Base 1.0 - with token-based pay-as-you-go billing. Per Nscale's own launch materials, pricing is based on input and output tokens for text and vision models, while image generation is priced on output image dimensions. Per-token rates are not published on a static official page: the docs direct users to the console's AI Services to Models list or the /v1/models API endpoint for pricing and context length. Every new user can claim $5 of free credit, and Nscale states the platform does not log or train on request or response content.

Every new user can claim $5 of free credit, stated in Nscale's Serverless Inference launch post (2 April 2025) and in its announcement that pricing is based on input and output tokens for text and vision models.

OpenInference - open-source LLM relay with a single OpenAI-compatible endpoint (Anthropic-format root also available at https://api.openference.com/), API-key auth, automatic provider failover and a zero-data-retention option; free to start, paid plans from USD 1/mo; documented per-model on-demand USD/1M pricing on openference.com/models.

Free plan: 3-day trial with open-source models — no credit card required

Pollinations.ai is a Berlin-based open-source platform providing a signup-free, OpenAI-compatible API for text, image, and audio generation. It aggregates multiple open-weights models (DeepSeek, Qwen, Mistral) and offers them for free to foster creative AI development.

Basic use needs no signup and no API key; new Pollen credit system gives ~1.5 Pollen/week free, with some models/higher limits requiring an account or paid tier. Pollen has no published USD rate - not quantifiable.

Vercel AI Gateway is a unified API gateway that allows routing to hundreds of models from various providers through a single OpenAI-compatible endpoint. It provides observability, budgets, and zero-data-retention (ZDR) options with no token markup over upstream list prices.

Each team account gets $5 of AI Gateway credit every 30 days to try any model; after your first payment you become a paid customer and stop receiving the free credit. Official figure.

AnyAPI is a commercial multi-model API aggregation gateway providing access to 400+ models via a single key. It offers a generous free tier for developers and scales to high-volume enterprise plans, supporting models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and open-weights families.

Free tier $0/mo: 100K tokens/day (~100 credits/day, 1 credit≈1K tokens), ~20 RPM / 200 RPD, free and basic models only, no card. ≈$3/mo blended at $1 per 1M tokens.

Dahl Inference is a high-performance platform offering decentralized access to open models like DeepSeek and MiniMax. It features an OpenAI-compatible API and a generous signup promotion of 100 million free tokens.

Value based on 100M free tokens at an estimated rate of $0.03/1M.

Dify is an open-source LLM app development platform. Its cloud service (Dify Cloud) provides hosted model access via an API, with credits consumable across OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, and others. Details were checked against the provider's own page at dify.ai.

200 message credits on Sandbox plan; value varies by model (e.g. GPT-4o = 10 credits).

Qiniu Cloud AI LLM Inference is a managed MaaS platform that provides a unified, compliant API for over 50 mainstream LLMs. It is compatible with both OpenAI and Anthropic protocols, offering new users substantial free tokens and flexible resource packages for production scaling.

First API key activates a shared 3M-token free resource pack (~$3 at $1/1M; auto-granted ~1h after first billable usage), then PAYG; several open-source models are permanently fully free (bonus, unquantified).