Hand-picked lists of free AI APIs grouped by what you're building — from hackathon starters to production RAG pipelines.
APIs with the easiest setup, highest free limits, and best documentation — picked for shipping speed. All no credit card required.
Providers offering comparable or better models than OpenAI, all with real free tiers and OpenAI-compatible APIs.
Every API in this list can be signed up for with just an email address. No payment details needed, ever.
Top providers for generating images via FLUX, Stable Diffusion, and other diffusion models. From free to production-grade.
Everything you need to add voice to your application: speech-to-text, text-to-speech, and real-time audio streaming.
APIs that don't get enough attention. High quality, generous free tiers, smaller user base — worth knowing about.
The best APIs for generating video from text or images. From short clips to cinematic sequences.
The best Chinese LLM providers with free tiers. Many offer generous token quotas and are optimized for Chinese-language tasks.
The best APIs for Retrieval-Augmented Generation: embeddings, reranking, web scraping, and semantic search.
Platforms for building and deploying AI agents without managing infrastructure. Many include free tiers with powerful underlying models.