I kept running into the same problem when looking for AI APIs for side projects. A provider would say it had a free plan, but once I opened the pricing page the offer would turn out to be a one-time credit, a short trial, or something that only became useful after adding a card.
At some point the word free stopped being useful on its own, so I started checking the details more carefully and separating the offers by how they actually work.
Groq
Groq is one of the cleaner examples because it has a real free API plan. You can start making requests without paying, and the main restriction is the rate limit attached to each model.
The exact limits depend on the model, but the important part is that the free usage is recurring. If you hit the limit, you wait for the quota to reset instead of immediately pulling out a credit card.
For prototyping with LLMs, testing a small app, or just experimenting, that is much more useful to me than a signup credit that disappears once you burn through it.
Cloudflare Workers AI
Cloudflare Workers AI also has recurring free usage.
The current free plan includes 10000 Neurons per day and the quota resets daily. Once you go beyond that amount, you either wait for the reset or move to paid usage depending on your setup.
I actually prefer this kind of model because it is predictable. You know what you get every day and the free part is not buried behind vague marketing language.
OpenRouter
OpenRouter is a bit different because the value of its free plan is mostly access to a pool of free models.
It currently gives access to more than 25 free models with a daily request limit on the free plan. That makes it useful if you want to test several models without creating five different accounts and wiring five different APIs into your project.
For model comparison and quick experiments it is one of the more convenient options.
AssemblyAI
AssemblyAI was one of the more surprising ones.
You can sign up without a credit card and the free tier currently includes up to 185 hours of prerecorded transcription and up to 333 hours of streaming transcription.
That is not just enough to test whether the API works. You can actually build something meaningful with it before paying.
For speech-to-text projects this is probably one of the stronger free offers I found.
Deepgram
Deepgram is a good example of why I think these offers need to be described more carefully.
New accounts currently get $200 in free credit and no credit card is required to start. The credit also does not expire, which is useful.
But I would not call that a permanent free tier because the credit is only given once. Once the $200 is gone, it is gone.
That is still a solid offer and for some projects it may actually be more useful than a small recurring quota. I just think calling both of those things "free tier" hides a pretty important difference.
NVIDIA NIM APIs
NVIDIA also gives developers access to free serverless inference through its API catalog.
There are multiple models available, including NVIDIA models and other open models, and it is useful if you want to test inference before paying for infrastructure or committing to one provider.
The limits vary depending on the API and model, so this is one of those cases where I would definitely check the current docs instead of trusting some random comparison table that was written six months ago.
What I noticed after checking all of this
I stopped thinking of free plans as one category.
There are really a few different things hiding behind the same word.
A recurring free quota gives you more usage after a reset. A one-time credit gives you a fixed amount once. A trial gives you temporary access. A free plan stays available but usually limits features, requests, models, or usage.
Those differences matter more than the word free itself.
If you want to keep a hobby project running for months, a recurring free quota can be much better than a large signup credit. If you just want to test an idea quickly, the opposite can be true.
What annoys me is that pricing pages often make you dig through multiple docs pages before you can answer something as basic as whether the free usage resets or whether you need a card.
That is why I ended up building FreeTierScout.
I wanted one place where I could quickly check the actual limit, whether it resets, whether a card is required, what happens when the free usage runs out, and whether the offer is really recurring or just a signup credit.
I am still adding providers and checking the details against official documentation.
If there is an API or developer service with a genuinely useful free plan that I am missing, send it my way.
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