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Alex Spinov
Alex Spinov

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11 Free AI APIs You Can Use Without Paying OpenAI

#ai #api #beginners #python

OpenAI costs money. Claude costs money. But there are genuinely free AI APIs that are surprisingly good.

I've tested all of these. Here are the ones worth your time.

1. Hugging Face Inference API — Free Tier

30+ model types: text generation, summarization, translation, image generation.

import requests

API_URL = "https://api-inference.huggingface.co/models/facebook/bart-large-cnn"
headers = {"Authorization": "Bearer hf_YOUR_FREE_TOKEN"}

def summarize(text):
    response = requests.post(API_URL, headers=headers, json={"inputs": text})
    return response.json()[0]["summary_text"]

print(summarize("Your long article text here..."))
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Free tier: 30K characters/month. Good enough for side projects.

2. Google Gemini API — Free Tier

Google's answer to GPT-4. Free tier is generous.

import requests

url = "https://generativelanguage.googleapis.com/v1beta/models/gemini-pro:generateContent"
params = {"key": "YOUR_FREE_KEY"}
data = {"contents": [{"parts": [{"text": "Explain quantum computing in 3 sentences"}]}]}

resp = requests.post(url, params=params, json=data)
print(resp.json()["candidates"][0]["content"]["parts"][0]["text"])
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Free tier: 60 requests/minute. That's a lot.

3. Ollama (Local) — Completely Free

Run LLMs on your own machine. Llama 3, Mistral, Phi — all free.

# Install
curl -fsSL https://ollama.com/install.sh | sh

# Run a model
ollama run llama3.2
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import requests

resp = requests.post("http://localhost:11434/api/generate", json={
    "model": "llama3.2",
    "prompt": "Write a Python function to sort a list",
    "stream": False
})
print(resp.json()["response"])
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Zero cost. Zero rate limits. Your data stays local.

4. Groq API — Free Tier (Fast!)

Fastest inference I've seen. Free tier available.

from groq import Groq

client = Groq(api_key="your_free_key")
response = client.chat.completions.create(
    model="llama-3.3-70b-versatile",
    messages=[{"role": "user", "content": "What is web scraping?"}]
)
print(response.choices[0].message.content)
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5. Cohere API — Free Tier

Text generation, embeddings, reranking, classification.

import cohere

co = cohere.Client("your_free_key")
response = co.generate(prompt="Write a blog post intro about Python")
print(response.generations[0].text)
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Free: 100 API calls/minute. Embeddings are especially good.

6. Cloudflare Workers AI — Free 

curl https://api.cloudflare.com/client/v4/accounts/{account_id}/ai/run/@cf/meta/llama-3-8b-instruct \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_TOKEN" \
  -d '{ "messages": [{ "role": "user", "content": "What is DNS?" }] }'
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10,000 free neurons/day. Runs on Cloudflare's edge.

7. Together AI — Free Credits

$5 free credits on signup. Open-source models.

8. Replicate — Free Tier

Image generation, audio, video models. Pay-per-prediction with free credits.

9. DeepSeek API

Chinese AI lab with surprisingly good models. Very cheap, sometimes free tier.

10. Mistral API — Free Tier

Mistral models are great for code. Free tier for small projects.

11. OpenRouter — Aggregator

One API to access 100+ models. Some are free.

import requests

resp = requests.post("https://openrouter.ai/api/v1/chat/completions",
    headers={"Authorization": "Bearer YOUR_KEY"},
    json={"model": "meta-llama/llama-3.2-3b-instruct:free",
          "messages": [{"role": "user", "content": "Hello"}]})
print(resp.json()["choices"][0]["message"]["content"])
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Comparison

API Best For Free Limit Quality
Hugging Face Specialized models 30K chars/mo Good
Gemini General chat 60 req/min Great
Ollama Privacy, no limits Unlimited Great
Groq Speed Limited Great
Cohere Embeddings 100 calls/min Good
Cloudflare Edge deployment 10K neurons/day Good
OpenRouter Model variety Some free Varies

Which free AI API has surprised you the most?

I was most surprised by Groq's speed — it feels instant.

Follow for more free API tutorials and developer tools.

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