Free APIs that are actually free

Quick answer

The best free LLM APIs are Groq, Google Gemini via AI Studio, OpenRouter and NVIDIA NIM, all of which offer a free tier without a payment card. For a free ChatGPT-compatible API, OpenRouter and Groq both expose OpenAI-compatible /v1 endpoints, so existing OpenAI client code works by changing the base URL and key. For free speech-to-text, Deepgram gives $200 of credit and Groq runs Whisper large-v3 within its free tier. This directory lists each one with its real limits, and marks the APIs that need no signup at all.

Most lists of free APIs tell you a service exists but not whether you can use it in the next thirty seconds. The distinction that matters is whether an API needs an account, a payment card, or neither — so every entry here states its real free-tier limits, and the ones needing no signup are marked.

Categories cover LLM and AI inference (Groq, Google Gemini, OpenRouter, NVIDIA NIM, Cerebras, Mistral, Cohere, Hugging Face, Together AI), speech (Deepgram, Groq Whisper, AssemblyAI, self-hosted Whisper), weather and reference data (Open-Meteo, Nominatim, REST Countries, Frankfurter, Wikimedia), developer infrastructure (Cloudflare Workers, Resend, Supabase, Neon, Upstash, GitHub), and media (Unsplash, Pexels, DiceBear).

It is curated rather than scraped. The exhaustive community directories — public-apis/public-apis, public-api-lists, awesome-freellm-apis, freellmapi and freellmpool — are linked at the foot of the page and remain the place to go when nothing here fits.

Free tiers change without notice, so the limits here are a guide. Check the provider before you build anything that depends on one.

Available free in the United Kingdom, United States, Ireland, Canada, Australia and across the EU. Because files are processed in your own browser and never uploaded, no personal data crosses a border, which keeps use consistent with UK GDPR, EU GDPR and CCPA/CPRA expectations.

The directory

LLM and AI inference

• Groq — Very fast inference for Llama, Mixtral and Whisper on custom hardware. Generous free tier with per-minute rate limits. No card.
• Google AI Studio (Gemini) — Gemini models, including long-context and multimodal. Free tier with daily request caps. No card for the free key.
• OpenRouter — One API in front of many providers; several models are free. A rotating set of :free models. No card to start.
• NVIDIA NIM — Hosted endpoints for a wide catalogue of open models. Free credits on signup.
• Cerebras — Extremely high token throughput on Llama models. Free tier with daily token limits.
• Mistral — Mistral and Codestral models. Free experimental tier with rate limits.
• Cohere — Command models, plus strong embeddings and reranking. Trial keys are rate-limited but do not expire.
• Hugging Face Inference — Thousands of open models behind one API. Free tier with monthly credits; larger models may cold-start.
• Together AI — Open models with an OpenAI-compatible API. Free credits on signup.

Speech — transcription and voice

• Deepgram — Streaming speech-to-text and Aura text-to-speech. $200 in credits on signup, no card.
• Groq Whisper — Whisper large-v3 transcription, unusually fast. Included in the Groq free tier.
• AssemblyAI — Transcription with diarisation and summarisation. Free credits on signup.
• Whisper (self-hosted) — Run transcription on your own machine — no API at all. Free forever; you provide the compute. (no signup)

Weather, geo and reference data

• Open-Meteo — Weather forecasts and history. Free for non-commercial use with no API key at all. (no signup)

  curl 'https://api.open-meteo.com/v1/forecast?latitude=28.61&longitude=77.21&current=temperature_2m'

• OpenStreetMap Nominatim — Geocoding and reverse geocoding. Free with a fair-use policy — one request per second. (no signup)

  curl -H 'User-Agent: my-app' 'https://nominatim.openstreetmap.org/search?q=Bhopal&format=json&limit=1'

• REST Countries — Country data: currencies, languages, flags, borders. Free tier, but v5 requires an API key sent as Authorization: Bearer. The old keyless v3.1 endpoint has been retired.
• Frankfurter — Exchange rates published by the European Central Bank. Free, no key. (no signup)

  curl 'https://api.frankfurter.dev/v1/latest?base=USD&symbols=INR'

• Wikipedia / Wikimedia REST — Article content, summaries and search. Free, no key, generous limits. (no signup)

  curl 'https://api.wikimedia.org/core/v1/wikipedia/en/page/WebAssembly/bare'

Developer utilities

• Cloudflare Workers — Edge functions, key-value store, D1 SQL and R2 object storage. 100,000 requests a day, with free tiers on D1 and R2 too.
• Resend — Transactional email with a clean API. 3,000 emails a month.
• Supabase — Postgres with auth, storage and realtime. Two free projects; they pause when idle.
• Neon — Serverless Postgres with database branching. Free tier with generous storage.
• Upstash — Serverless Redis and Kafka, billed per request. 10,000 commands a day.
• GitHub REST API — Repositories, issues, actions, releases. 60 requests an hour unauthenticated, 5,000 with a token.

Images and media

• Unsplash — High-quality photography. 50 requests an hour in demo mode.
• Pexels — Free stock photos and video. 200 requests an hour.
• DiceBear — Generated avatars from any seed string. Free, no key. (no signup)

  curl 'https://api.dicebear.com/9.x/initials/svg?seed=AIM'

• placehold.co — Placeholder images by URL. Free, no key. (no signup)

  curl -o out.png 'https://placehold.co/600x400/png'

Endpoints last tested 16 August 2026.

Frequently asked questions

Which free APIs need no signup at all?

Open-Meteo, OpenStreetMap Nominatim, REST Countries, Frankfurter, Wikimedia REST, DiceBear and placehold.co can all be called without an account or key. The community directories are also free to browse.

What is the best free LLM API?

It depends on what limits you hit first. Groq is fastest and has a generous free tier; Google AI Studio gives Gemini with daily caps; OpenRouter exposes a rotating set of free models behind one API. For most projects the rate limit matters more than the model.

Is there a free speech-to-text API?

Deepgram gives $200 of credit on signup with no card, and Groq offers Whisper large-v3 within its free tier. Whisper can also be run locally at no cost if you have the compute.

Is there a free ChatGPT API?

OpenAI itself has no free tier, but OpenRouter and Groq both expose OpenAI-compatible endpoints with free models — existing ChatGPT client code works by changing the base URL and API key. Google Gemini via AI Studio is also free and has an OpenAI-compatible mode.

How do I get a free Google Gemini API key?

Sign in at aistudio.google.com and create an API key. The free tier has daily request caps and needs no payment card, which makes it one of the few free LLM APIs usable immediately.

Is the NVIDIA API free?

NVIDIA NIM at build.nvidia.com gives free credits on signup and hosts a wide catalogue of open models behind hosted endpoints.

Do these free tiers require a credit card?

Most do not. Entries that require a card are marked, because it is usually the thing that stops someone using an API in the moment.