How to get free AI API credits in 2026
You do not need a big budget to build with AI models. Between free tiers, cloud welcome credits, promo codes and startup programs, most developers can prototype for weeks or months before paying anything. The trick is knowing which source to use at which stage, so you are not burning a large one-time grant on experiments that a free tier would have covered. This guide walks through the options in the order we suggest using them.
Start with free tiers that need no application
Free tiers are the best place to begin because they do not expire after a few weeks and nobody has to approve you. They come with rate limits, so they suit prototypes, scripts and personal tools rather than production traffic.
A few that are listed on PerkRadar at the time of writing:
- Groq offers no-charge API usage within model-specific rate limits.
- Cloudflare Workers AI includes 10,000 Neurons of inference per day.
- Cohere gives evaluation keys with up to 1,000 API calls a month.
- Modal includes $30 of free compute every month, which you can use to run open models yourself.
- Cerebras offers a small one-time inference credit to try its hardware.
Free-tier limits change often. Before you build anything that depends on one, open the provider's pricing page and confirm the current limits.
Use cloud welcome credits for bigger experiments
The large clouds give new accounts a one-time credit, and those credits can often be spent on their own model services. That makes them useful when you want to try a hosted model, fine-tune something small or run a batch job.
Current welcome offers in the catalog include a $300 Google Cloud credit for 90 days, a $200 Azure credit for 30 days, $100 at AWS signup with the chance to earn up to $100 more, and a $300 Oracle Cloud trial alongside its Always Free services.
These credits have short windows. Plan the experiment first, then open the account, so the clock is not running while you are still deciding what to build. Also check which services the credit covers, because some marketplace or third-party models are excluded.
Pick up promo codes from smaller inference providers
Newer inference platforms compete hard for developers, and many hand out credits through promo codes shared in launch posts, newsletters and creator videos. These are usually modest, often between $25 and $100, but they add up and they let you compare providers side by side.
Examples in the catalog include $100 in Fireworks inference credits, $100 in serverless LLM credits from Inference.net, $50 in model credits from Hopscotch AI and $100 in Exa search API credits. We link each offer to its official source and a claim guide, and the codes themselves are on the offer pages.
Use small promo credits for benchmarking. Run the same prompts against two or three providers and keep notes on speed, quality and cost before you commit to one.
Apply to startup programs once you have a real project
Startup programs are where the large numbers live, but they come with eligibility rules. Many require a company, a product, a website, and sometimes funding or a referral from an accelerator or investor partner.
Some of the bigger AI-focused programs listed on PerkRadar advertise up to $100,000 in additional Anthropic credits, up to $1,000 in OpenAI API credits, up to $50,000 in Together AI credits at its top tier, up to $3,000 in OpenRouter credits with 0% fees for 12 months, and up to $350,000 from Google Cloud for AI startups.
Treat those figures as advertised maximums. Most approved companies receive a lower tier, and approval is never guaranteed. A clear one-paragraph description of what you are building and why you need the provider tends to help more than a long pitch.
Look at special-case programs
A few programs do not fit the usual categories but can be very generous if they match your situation:
- OpenAI offers large daily free token allowances when you agree to share your API traffic with them. Only consider this if you are comfortable with that data being used, and never send customer or personal data through it.
- Alibaba Cloud Model Studio gives a free token quota on Qwen and other models, typically around 1 million tokens per model for 90 days.
- Anthropic and Cohere both list credit programs for research and public-good projects. The amounts are not published, so expect to explain your work.
Match the source to your stage
It helps to think of these sources as a ladder rather than a menu. Each step is bigger, but it also asks more of you and usually comes with a shorter clock.
- Learning and tinkering: free tiers only. There is no reason to spend a one-time credit on tutorials.
- Building a prototype: free tiers plus a couple of promo credits so you can compare providers on your real prompts.
- Testing with real users: a cloud welcome credit or a model provider's smaller startup offer, with alerts set up.
- Running a company: the full startup programs, applied for one at a time as each service becomes part of your stack.
If you are not sure which step you are on, stay a step lower. Free tiers rarely expire, and large grants rarely wait.
Protect your credits once you have them
Free credits are easy to lose. A runaway loop or a forgotten endpoint can drain a balance overnight, and many grants expire whether you use them or not.
- Write down each credit, its amount and its expiry date in one place.
- Set a billing alert or spending cap on every account that has a card attached.
- Use separate API keys per project so you can see what is consuming credits.
- Do not create extra accounts to claim the same offer twice. It usually breaks the terms and can get every account closed.
When a credit is close to expiring, spend it on something durable, such as an evaluation run you can reuse later, rather than letting it lapse.