Free AI API keys for students

BluesMinds is a primarily-paid AI relay reselling access to Claude and GPT at significant discounts. It offers a large free credit bonus ($500) for accounts linked to aged GitHub profiles, and provides free daily calls for specialized models like GPT-4.1.

Up to ~$500 in credits for aged GitHub accounts per community reports.

Vertex AI serves Google's Gemini models through Google Cloud's paid API (aiplatform.googleapis.com), with project-level billing and a choice between global and non-global endpoints; the generative-AI pricing URL now renders as the Agent Platform (Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform) pricing page. Published list prices per 1M tokens: Gemini 3.8 / 3.7 / 3.6 Flash are on introductory pricing of $0.75 input and $3.75 output through December 31, 2026, rising to $1.50 and $7.50 on January 1, 2027, while Gemini 3.5 Flash-Lite is $0.30 input and $2.50 output and Gemini 2.5 Flash is $0.30 and $2.50. The Vertex pricing page states no standing free monthly token allowance for Gemini; Google's free-tier documentation instead gives $300 in 90-day Free Trial credit and a separate free tier for many Gemini models under the Gemini Developer API (AI Studio).

Google Cloud Free Trial gives $300 in Welcome credit valid for 90 days for eligible new billing accounts (cloud.google.com/free/docs/free-cloud-features); the Vertex generative-AI pricing page itself lists no free token allowance but does include 5,000 free grounding queries per month across Gemini 3 models.

Amazon Polly is AWS's text-to-speech service, billed monthly per character of text converted to speech or Speech Marks. Published rates per 1 million characters are $4.00 Standard, $16.00 Neural, $100.00 Long-Form and $30.00 Generative (GovCloud US: $4.80 Standard, $19.20 Neural). The free tier includes 5 million Standard characters per month plus 1 million Neural, 500,000 Long-Form and 100,000 Generative characters per month for the first 12 months.

Up to $200 in AWS Free Tier credits for new customers (from July 15, 2025), applicable to eligible services including Polly; AWS states $100 in credits immediately plus up to $100 more earned, on a free plan lasting 6 months with credits expiring 12 months after account creation.

Agent Router is an open-source, public-welfare AI API aggregation platform designed to unify access to agents and MCP tools. It is 'forever free' for both users and developers, providing a discovery registry for skills (ClawHub) and a live A2A directory.

Offers $100-$200 free credit bonus for new accounts to bootstrap agent usage.

Deepgram sells speech-to-text, text-to-speech and voice-agent APIs on pay-as-you-go terms with a $200 free credit and no credit card required at sign-up. Speech-to-text is billed per minute: Nova-3 is $0.0043/min pre-recorded monolingual and $0.0052/min multilingual (about $0.29 and $0.35 per hour streaming), while Flux for real-time agents is $0.0065/min English and $0.0078/min multilingual under limited-time promotional rates. Text-to-speech runs from $0.0150/1k characters (Aura-1) to $0.0450/1k characters (Flux TTS), and the Voice Agent API starts at $0.050/min.

$200 free credit on the Pay As You Go plan, stated on deepgram.com/pricing as 'Free $200 Credit then pay-as-you-go' with 'No credit card required' and 'No minimums. No expiration.'

Mistral's La Plateforme is a first-party EU-based API with per-1M-token pricing, a 50% batch discount and up to 90% cached-input savings. The free plan includes $10/month of API credits plus Vibe and Studio access; Pro ($14.99/mo) raises that to $30/month. Open-weight models are available for self-hosting (Apache 2.0 for research/individual; commercial use requires a Mistral license).

Community reported approximate monthly value of the Experiment free tier for developers.

token.sensenova.cn is the official Token Plan for SenseTime's SenseNova multimodal AI platform. During its public beta, it offers generous free quotas for models like SenseNova 6.8 Flash Lite and U1 Fast, suitable for complex office workflows.

Free public beta (extended to end of July): 1,500 calls/5h per model (verified: 60k points/5h on token-plan page); ~7,200 calls/day ~ $200/mo equivalent at ~1K tokens/call. Phone signup, up to 20 API keys.

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.

Speechmatics is a speech-to-text API (real-time WebSocket and async batch) with NLP insights (summaries, intents, sentiment). Self-serve Free and Pro plans: new sign-ups get a $100 credit grant (1 credit = $1) with no card required; Pro adds pay-as-you-go billing with volume discounts above 500 hours/month; Enterprise is contract-based with on-prem/on-device deployment. Rates start around $0.129/hr (2026 pricing page snippet); legacy free tier was 8 hours/month.

Official docs: new sign-ups receive a $100 credit grant at no cost (1 credit = $1 USD), usable on Free at no charge and drawn down first on Pro — direct 1:1 credit value. (Pre-Accounts before 2026-08-01 receive an additional one-time $25 transition credit.)

You.com Search API: real-time LLM-ready web + news search (you-search), plus Contents, Research, Answer, and Finance Research APIs. Free keyless MCP access at 100 queries/day; new API accounts start with $100 in complimentary credits (no card); per-usage credit billing for higher tiers.

$100 in complimentary credits granted to new API accounts at you.com/platform, no credit card required (one-time).

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.

Gladia is a speech-to-text API for real-time streaming and async transcription in 100+ languages with speaker diarization, word-level timestamps, and automatic language detection. Prepaid credit wallet: Starter $0.61/hr async, $0.75/hr real-time; Growth from $0.20/hr async and $0.25/hr real-time (volume-committed); Enterprise custom. New accounts get 50€ in one-time free credits.

50€ one-time free credit grant (no monthly reset); ≈ $54 at ~1.08 EUR/USD. Per Gladia FAQ, roughly 80+ hours of async or 60+ hours of real-time transcription at current rates.

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).

Context7 (Upstash): library/developer-docs search API — find up-to-date documentation snippets for libraries, frameworks, and codebases. API key optional: anonymous access has low shared rate limits; free API key (ctx7sk) at context7.com/dashboard raises limits. Not a general web search.

Free tier exists (anon + free API key) but Context7 publishes no public per-query price, so value cannot be quantified honestly.

Groq runs LPU inference hardware tuned for raw tokens-per-second. The API offers a documented free developer tier — per-model rate limits such as 30 RPM / 1,000 RPD / 8K TPM on gpt-oss-120b — with full x-ratelimit-* header observability, and paid Developer plans that add Batch and Flex processing plus higher ceilings.

Community reported approximate monthly value of free tier rate limits for individual developers.

Pioneer AI, by Fastino Labs, provides an inference API for specialized tasks like data extraction and classification. It offers seat-based subscriptions with included platform credits and priority support.

$75 free usage credits — no credit card required

AeroLink (aerolink.lat) is a commercial AI API gateway and relay service that routes multiple coding assistants and automation tools through a single key. It offers tiered subscription plans with rolling usage windows and claims access to high-end models like Claude Opus 4.8.

Starter plan offers a 1-week free trial included in the promo.

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.

Exa: neural web search API for AI agents — keyword + semantic search over a 70B+ document index, plus Deep Search, Contents, and Agent products. 10 QPS free, 25 QPS pay-as-you-go; SOC 2 Type II; ~$120 total credits per year free (20 at signup + 10/month).

Free tier is $20 one-time + $10/month credits (>$120/yr total) — recurring monthly value is $10 but free credits exceed the $10 search budget at $7/1k requests, so not expressed as a single clean USD figure.

Modal is serverless compute for AI workloads rather than a token-billed model API: you pay per second for CPU, memory and GPU time (H100 SXM5 $0.001097/sec, B200 $0.001736/sec, CPU $0.0000131 per core per second) and never for idle resources. The Starter plan is $0 plus compute and includes $30 per month of free compute with 3 seats, 100 containers and 10 GPU concurrency; Team is $250 per month with $100 per month of free compute. Volumes include 1 TiB per month free, then $0.09/GiB per month.

Starter plan includes $30 per month of free compute, stated on the Modal pricing page (Team includes $100 per month on the $250 plan); academics can apply separately for up to $10,000 in credits.

Z.ai is Zhipu AI's international developer platform, offering access to the GLM (General Language Model) family. It provides a high-performance alternative to Western models, with the GLM-Flash series offered permanently for free to developers to encourage global adoption of its flagship reasoning models.

GLM Flash models (4.7/4.5 text, 4.6V vision) listed $0 on official pricing — ongoing free models, not trial credits; ~1 QPS and ~1K calls/day (third-party, unofficial) → ≈$30/mo blended. Flagship GLM-5.x paid.

Tokeness (tokeness.io) is an AI model aggregator providing access to 50+ frontier models via a standard, unified API protocol. It focuses on stability and security, relaying requests without retaining conversation data. It includes a referral program and free routing options.

New users get only ~¥0.5 (≈$0.07) trial credit at signup, after which calls require prepayment (deducted from balance); there is no public, sustained free allowance, so it is a paid aggregator.

AssemblyAI sells speech-to-text, speech understanding and voice agent APIs with pay-as-you-go hourly pricing and no credit card required to start. The free tier is published as up to 185 hours of pre-recorded transcription and up to 333 hours of streaming transcription. Published rates are $0.15 per hour for Universal-2 (99 languages) and $0.21 per hour for Universal-3.5 Pro (18 languages with native code switching), while realtime runs at $0.15 per hour for Universal-Streaming (English) and multilingual, or $0.45 per hour for Universal-3.5 Pro Realtime. The Voice Agent API is $4.50 per hour ($0.075 per minute) with every feature included, and the Dictation API is $0.62 per hour.

Free tier is stated as up to 185 hours of pre-recorded transcription and up to 333 hours of streaming transcription with no credit card required; valued at the lowest published pre-recorded rate (Universal-2 at $0.15 per hour) this is about $27.75, an estimate because AssemblyAI publishes hours rather than a USD credit (assemblyai.com/pricing, checked 2026-09-16).

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.