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).

Ollama Web Search: REST API (POST https://ollama.com/api/web_search) returning up to 10 results per query, plus web_fetch; requires a free Ollama account/API key (no anonymous tier). Generous free tier for individuals; higher rate limits via Ollama Cloud subscription. No public per-query dollar pricing.

Free tier described as 'generous' for individuals with no published quota or per-search price — value not quantifiable from official sources.

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%.

Brave Search API: real-time web search (LLM-optimized context, news, images, videos) and Answers endpoint, powered by Brave's independent index of 30B+ pages. 50 req/s capacity on search; $5 free credits auto-applied monthly; credit card required as anti-fraud. SOC 2 Type II attested, zero-data-retention options.

$5 free credit auto-applied to account every month (per brave.com/search/api and API dashboard pricing page).

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.

Firecrawl: web-to-LLM-context platform — scrape, crawl, map, search, extract, and browser Interact APIs. Credits-based: 1 credit = 1 page (scrape/crawl/map); search costs 2 credits per 10 results. Free 1,000 credits/month (500 searches) with no card; paid subs from $16-19/mo with pay-as-you-go overage in $5 increments (paid plans only).

Free 1,000 credits/mo ≈ 500 searches (2 credits per 10 results) or 1,000 pages; Firecrawl publishes no per-search dollar price for the free allocation, so value left null.

Flatkey.ai is a commercial AI API gateway aggregating over 200 official models under a single API key. It uses a prepaid pay-as-you-go model, claiming to be significantly cheaper than official pricing by leveraging high-volume enterprise agreements.

Search reports a $5 initial credit for testing.

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.

IAMHC (Xinjiang Huancheng Wangan) is a public-welfare AI API gateway providing unified access to over 199 mainstream models. It features a rate-limited free tier and emphasizes compliance with built-in moderation for developers in the China region.

Free tier: small-parameter models only, ~1500 calls per 5h (some sources say ~800), unguaranteed and test-only; paid pub/VIP/SVIP tiers. Rough ≈$5/mo equivalent; reliability low.

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.

Modal (modal.com) is a serverless compute platform optimized for AI infrastructure. Rather than a per-token API, it bills by the GPU-second, allowing developers to deploy custom models. A 'Starter' tier provides $30/month in free compute credits.

~$5/month free credits on signup; ~$30/month after adding a payment method (a card on file is required to use Modal); billed by compute-second. Value shown is the no-card free tier.

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.

SambaNova Cloud provides fast LLM inference on specialized RDU hardware. It offers an OpenAI-compatible API with a persistent free tier (Developer Tier) and pay-as-you-go credits for higher rate limits.

One-time $5 signup credit for testing; persistent free tier limited by rate, not total dollar value.

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.

v0 by Vercel is an AI-powered full-stack web application builder that generates React components and backend logic. Usage is metered on input and output tokens which convert to credits. It provides access to various models including v0 Mini, Pro, and Max tiers.

No public free-tier information found (researched 2026-08-29).

DoCode is a relay specifically optimized for AI coding workflows (Claude Code, Cursor, Codex). It uses heavy caching and model routing to lower costs, with VIP tiers for further discounts. Authentication via sk- key.

$200 trial credits on signup; estimated real value based on ¥1:$50 ratio.

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).

VSLLM (Weiyun Model Open Platform) is a commercial AI API relay gateway that aggregates multiple large models. It is OpenAI-compatible and features a daily auto-refreshing free quota for new sign-ups. Claims to offer highly competitive, transparent pricing based on actual token usage.

Free subscription auto-refreshes daily without claiming: ~20 API calls + ~100K tokens/day (non-cumulative, reset next day) ~ $3/mo at $1/1M tokens; also GitHub-star and daily check-in reward activities.

Serper: fast (1-2s) Google SERP API — web, news, images, places, scholar, patents, videos, shopping, autocomplete as structured JSON. Credit-based prepaid billing: 2,500 free credits on signup, $1.00/1k base dropping to $0.30/1k at volume; credits valid 6 months; failed requests not billed. (Official pricing page is 404 — figures corroborated across multiple independent 2026 sources.)

2,500 free signup credits × $1.00/1k base rate ≈ $2.50 (one-time, credits expire in 6 months).

SiliconFlow (SiliconCloud) is a premier Chinese AI model platform offering high-performance inference for a wide range of open-source models (Qwen, Llama, DeepSeek). It is notable for providing free, permanent API access to models with parameters under 9B, alongside competitive pay-as-you-go rates for larger flagship

Signup grants ~CNY 14 (≈$2.08) credit, plus ~CNY 16 (≈$2.38) voucher after real-name verification; many <=9B open-source models (Qwen2.5-7B, Llama3.1-8B, etc.) are permanently free; direct access within mainland China. Since 2026-05-15, unverified users are capped at 10 RPM and delinquent/unverified accounts are cut off.