Maintained buyer guide
Free AI Inference in 2026: Credits, Limits and Catches
Free inference is not one market. Some providers give repeatable daily capacity, some expose a prototype sandbox, and others rotate zero-price models until demand changes. This guide compares what you can actually build before paying.
not stated; experimental availability may change or stop during high demand
- Useful monthly capacity
- ≈15B input + 150M output tokens per 30 days, if continuously available
- Models / fit
- Qwen/Qwen3.6-35B-A3B-FP8
- Card
- unknown
- After free use
- Requests are rate-limited. Hetzner does not promise continued availability.
not stated; availability can rotate
- Useful monthly capacity
- Not publicly quantified; catalog and account limits can rotate
- Models / fit
- poolside/laguna-s-2.1:free, poolside/laguna-xs-2.1:free, stepfun/step-3.7-flash:free, tencent/hy3:free, upstage/solar-pro4:free
- Card
- unknown
- After free use
- Choose a paid model or wait for limits to reset; free-model availability can rotate.
Ongoing; model availability rotates
- Useful monthly capacity
- Request-based; current account cap applies across free models
- Models / fit
- openrouter/free, Models ending in :free
- Card
- no
- After free use
- Wait for the daily reset, purchase credits to change account limits, or use paid models.
Ongoing daily allocation
- Useful monthly capacity
- 300,000 Neurons per 30 days
- Models / fit
- Cloudflare Workers AI model catalog
- Card
- no for Workers Free
- After free use
- Free-plan operations fail until reset. Workers Paid charges $0.011 per 1,000 Neurons above the free allocation.
not stated
- Useful monthly capacity
- Not stated as a monthly allowance; rate-limited prototype access
- Models / fit
- NVIDIA NIM hosted catalog
- Card
- no
- After free use
- Use a partner endpoint or deploy a NIM locally when the hosted prototype limit is insufficient.
Ongoing for selected models
- Useful monthly capacity
- Model- and project-specific quota shown in AI Studio
- Models / fit
- Selected Gemini models marked Free Tier on the official pricing page
- Card
- no for Free tier
- After free use
- Wait for quota reset or link billing and move to a paid usage tier.
Ongoing free account tier
- Useful monthly capacity
- Model-specific daily request and token limits
- Models / fit
- GroqCloud production and preview catalog
- Card
- no for Free tier
- After free use
- Wait for limits to reset or upgrade to the Developer plan.
Start with workload shape, not the biggest number
A huge daily token ceiling is useful only if the endpoint supports your model, input type, latency target, and reliability needs. Hetzner's experiment is unusually generous but explicitly unstable. Cloudflare's allowance is durable but measured in Neurons, so model choice changes how far it goes. NVIDIA Build is a prototype environment rather than a promised monthly bucket.
For a small evaluation harness, a rotating free-model router may be enough. For a customer-facing feature, treat every free path as disposable capacity and keep a paid fallback.
Permanent free tier vs promotional access
Repeatable free tier
A documented allowance resets on a known cadence. Cloudflare's daily Neuron allocation is the clearest example in this snapshot.
Experiment or rotating catalog
The provider can remove a model, throttle access, or end the experiment without a published date. Hetzner and rotating :free catalogs belong here.
The privacy catch is part of the price
A zero-dollar request can still carry a data trade-off. Google marks free-tier usage differently from paid-tier usage on its pricing table. Router services may select providers with different retention rules. Never send secrets, production customer data, or regulated records until you have checked the current provider and model terms.
- • Prefer synthetic evaluation data for first tests.
- • Pin a provider when router privacy policies differ.
- • Re-check terms before moving from prototype to production.
A practical selection order
- 1. Define the minimum model and modality.
Text-only extraction, vision, coding agents, and embeddings need different catalogs.
- 2. Convert limits into your own requests.
Estimate input, output, retries, and concurrency—not just headline tokens.
- 3. Check card, region, and data terms.
These can disqualify an otherwise attractive tier.
- 4. Price the fallback before launch.
Know what happens after the allowance and how quickly you can switch.
See only the offers that are current now
The guide explains the trade-offs. The live Deals page handles expiry, verification windows, and claim links.
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