Free AI video quotas worth knowing (Oct 2026 caps)

unicodefawn — Sat, 10 Oct 2026 08:41:53 +0000

Short list of free or freemium video-generation allowances that still show up when you need a clip for a demo or placeholder. Caps change often — treat these as rounded figures and check the provider's page.

I'm a co-founder of nopaywall, a public catalog of free AI offers, API tiers, generation limits, and alternatives. Cards there show the checked terms and a last-checked date.

One-time or small free credits

Runway — about 125 one-time free credits on the free plan; watermark on free exports (checked Oct 2026).
Replicate — about $5 in free credits for new accounts (checked Oct 2026).
Qiroq — about 10 credits per month at 480p with watermark (checked Oct 2026).

Monthly / recurring free lanes

Google Vids — about 6 clips per month on the free lane (checked Oct 2026).
Synthesia — free plan around 1,200 credits per month (roughly ~10 minutes of avatar video; check current plan terms) (checked Oct 2026).

Useful framing

"Free" almost always means a hard cap, a watermark, non-commercial rights, or a short trial. Eligibility can vary by country. If a card on nopaywall looks wrong, the catalog is updated from source pages on a schedule — open the card for the last-checked date.

More video + image + music caps: nopaywall.io/limits.

Free LLM API tiers in 2026: the actual rate limits, and why they keep changing

unicodefawn — Sat, 10 Oct 2026 00:55:51 +0000

Disclosure: I'm a co-founder of nopaywall, the catalog this post draws from.

If you've ever built a side project on a "free" LLM API, you know the problem: the free tier is real, but the limits are buried in docs, they change without notice, and the blog post you found last year is wrong now. I'll go through what the free tiers look like at the moment and how we keep the data current.

The numbers (as listed on 2026-10-07, rounded)

Provider	Free limit	Notes
Groq	~30 RPM, ~1K requests/day, ~8K tokens/min	GPT-OSS 120B/20B, Qwen, Whisper
Google AI Studio (Gemini API)	~15 RPM, ~500 requests/day, ~250K tokens/min
Mistral Codestral	~30 RPM, ~2K requests/day	code-focused
Hugging Face Inference	~300 requests/hour
Puter.js	~30 requests per 10 s, 3 concurrent	runs from the browser

These are caps, not promises. Eligibility can vary by country, so check each provider's terms before you ship anything that depends on them.

Practical takeaways

Prototype vs. production. Around 500 to 1K requests a day is enough for a demo, a personal tool or a hackathon. A public app with real users will hit it on day one.
Watch tokens per minute, not just RPM. An 8K TPM limit allows only a few long-context calls per minute, even if you're well under the request cap.
Build a fallback chain. Since several providers serve the same open model families (Llama, Qwen, DeepSeek, Mistral, Gemma, GPT-OSS…), you can put an OpenAI-compatible router in front and fail over when you hit a 429.
Pin the date. When you write down a limit in your README, write the date you checked it next to it.

How the catalog stays current

nopaywall lists 100+ free API providers, with a model finder so you can search by model family instead of by vendor. Collection and checking are automated with source evidence: sources (GitHub repos and topic lists) are collected, then the official pricing or docs page is inspected. A card goes public only when it has a reachable destination and enough evidence for the limit. API providers and limits are re-checked within 72 hours. Cards are removed after a confirmed expiry or a failed verification. Unclear records stay off public pages.

Free, freemium, open-source and paid access are labeled separately. That way "free trial, card required" doesn't get mixed up with "free tier".

DEV Community: unicodefawn