Is there a free LLM API that does not need a credit card?
Yes. Our free key needs an email or a Google sign-in, no card and no identity check, and it comes with a weekly allowance worth roughly 3.9M tokens on DeepSeek-V4-Flash. Several vendors run free tiers too; the practical differences are the size of the allowance, whether the free tier is rate-limited, and what happens when you run out.
What our free tier is
- A key in about 30 seconds — email or Google, no card, no KYC.
- A weekly allowance, roughly 3.9M tokens on DeepSeek-V4-Flash. It resets every 7 days.
- The same OpenAI-compatible endpoint paying accounts use. Not a sandbox, not a different model.
- Streaming and tool calling included.
What it is not
- It is not the whole catalogue. GLM-5.2 is on paid plans only, because we buy it from a third party rather than serving it ourselves.
- It has no failover. Free requests go to the open network; when that network is saturated, they fail. Paid plans fall back to a second provider — that is the concrete difference, and it is the one that matters for anything unattended.
- It has a 5-hour burst cap as well as the weekly one, so a single long agent run can hit a limit before the week does.
What to expect from any free tier
Free tiers move. Allowances get cut, models get retired, and terms change without much notice — including ours. Read the provider’s own page for current numbers rather than a comparison article, and do not build anything with a deadline on top of a free tier you do not pay for.
If you are evaluating providers, the useful test is not the size of the free allowance. It is what one real hour of your actual workload costs once you are past it.
FAQ
▸Is a free API key really free, or is it a trial?
Ours is a recurring weekly allowance, not a one-off trial credit — it resets every 7 days for as long as the account exists. No card is stored, so nothing starts billing when it runs out; requests simply stop until the reset or until you add a plan or balance.
▸What happens when I hit the limit?
You get a 402 if there is no allowance and no balance, or a 429 with a Retry-After header if you have hit the rolling 5-hour or weekly cap. Neither is a ban — both clear on their own.
▸Do I need a phone number?
No. Email or Google sign-in is the whole verification.