SambaNova serves its model list without a key, but the inference now needs a card

Almost every inference provider puts /v1/models behind auth. Groq returns 403 without a key, Together 401, DeepSeek 401, Cerebras 403.

SambaNova just answers:

curl -s https://api.sambanova.ai/v1/models

No key, no account, no header. Today it returns exactly 7 models:

DeepSeek-V3.1                  131072
DeepSeek-V3.2                   32768
Meta-Llama-3.3-70B-Instruct    131072
MiniMax-M2.7                   196608
MiniMax-M3                    1048576
gemma-4-31B-it                 131072
gpt-oss-120b                   131072

Seven is a small number, and that's the useful part. Provider comparisons tend to quote catalog sizes in the hundreds, which mostly measures how many old checkpoints someone left listed. This is the whole menu.

Two things in there worth noticing. MiniMax-M3 carries a 1,048,576-token context window, which is a million tokens on a provider whose pitch is throughput rather than context. And DeepSeek-V3.2 is listed at 32,768 — a quarter of V3.1's 131,072. Newer version, smaller window, so if you bump the model string assuming context goes up or stays flat, that one will bite.

Now the correction, because I got this wrong when I first looked at it: a public catalog is not a free tier. I read the open /v1/models endpoint as a signal that SambaNova was still the no-card option it used to be. It isn't. Actual inference calls now come back with:

402 PAYMENT_METHOD_REQUIRED

on a zero balance, and the pricing page lists per-token rates for all seven models with no free row anywhere. The standing free tier — 20 requests/day, 200K tokens/day, no card — is gone.

So the endpoint is still worth knowing about, just for a narrower reason than I thought: it lets you diff the model IDs your config hardcodes against the live catalog, in CI, with no secret to provision. Most providers make you burn a key for that. It just won't tell you whether you can afford to call any of them.

The corrected write-up, with what it costs now: SambaNova Cloud: the free tier is gone