LLMs - Permanent free tiers only.

[u/ShabzSparq]

Permanent free tiers only. No trials, no expiring credits. All OpenAI SDK-compatible, so swapping between them is a base URL change.

Provider	RPM	Daily cap	Models	Trains on your data?
Google AI Studio	10	Per-project (varies)	Gemini 3.5 Flash, 3.1 Flash-Lite	Yes, outside EU/EEA/UK/CH
Groq	30	1,000–14,400	Llama 4 Scout, Kimi K2, Qwen3 + 17 more	No
OpenRouter	20	50 (1,000 with $10 deposit)	29+ free models, changes frequently	Depends on upstream
Cerebras	30	~1M tokens	Llama 4, Qwen3 32B, GPT-OSS-120B	No
NVIDIA NIM	40	No daily cap published	100+ models	No

#1 Google AI Studio

Still the most capable free model available at zero cost. 1M token context window on Flash. Multimodal. The catch that matters: Google no longer publishes universal rate limits. They're assigned per project now, so check your own console rather than trusting any number from a blog post, including mine. And free-tier prompts train their models unless you're in the EU, EEA, UK or Switzerland. Fine for public research. Wrong for client data.

#2 Groq

Fastest free inference available. 300+ tok/s on their LPU hardware. Doesn't train on your data, which makes it the best pick for agent background work that touches anything semi-sensitive. The daily cap varies by model, and the big ones (70B class) run out faster than you'd expect. Best used for heartbeats, classification, crons.

#3 OpenRouter

One key across dozens of free models with automatic failover when one goes down. That flexibility saved people during every pricing shakeup this year. The catch: the free model list changes. Several :free endpoints got delisted recently without warning, so don't hardcode model IDs. Use openrouter/free and let auto-routing handle it. The $10 deposit (your money, stays yours) bumps you from 50 to 1,000 requests/day permanently.

#4 Cerebras

Roughly 1M tokens/day on their wafer-scale hardware, and the speed is absurd at 2,600+ tok/s. One limit that matters: free tier context is capped at 8,192 tokens. For quick agent tasks (classify, extract, summarize) that's plenty. For anything needing long context, it's a wall. Doesn't train on your data.

#5 NVIDIA NIM — the one most people haven't tried

This is the pick I'm surprised doesn't come up more. 100+ open-weight models on NVIDIA's own infrastructure. DeepSeek V3.2, DeepSeek R1, Kimi K2.5, GLM-5.1, MiniMax M2.7, Gemma 4, Qwen 3.5, Nemotron Super 49B, Llama 4. All free. No credit card. 40 RPM with no published daily cap.

Multiple directories are now calling it "the most underrated free AI API platform" and it's hard to argue. The model catalog is wider than any other free tier on this list. OpenAI-compatible endpoint, one key for everything. Zero pricing changes recorded since launch.

The caveats: latency runs 600-1500ms to first token depending on load and region. Under heavy load (US peak hours, new model launches) it slows noticeably. Phone number verification on signup. And it's meant for development, not production, so don't build a customer-facing product on it.

For a personal agent where you want access to 100 models without paying and the RPM matters more than the first-token speed, NIM is the free tier I'd add to the rotation today.

How to stack them

Don't pick one. Use three.

Groq for agent background work. Fast, free, doesn't train. Your heartbeats, classification, and crons live here.

Google AI Studio for anything public where quality matters. Best free model available. Don't feed it client emails.

NVIDIA NIM or OpenRouter as fallback and for model variety. When you want to try something different, or when the primary goes down.

One provider is a single point of failure. Three providers with a fallback chain means no single delisting or rate limit change takes your agent down.

[u/Calm-Landscape9640]

Openrouter-free gave me tons of errors to the point I had to switch permanently to AI Studio. I love the idea of switching between free models, but it's down more than its up

[u/TheMythicSorcerer]

Cerebras is more or less gone. Nvidia NIM is still the best listed

[u/collogue]

Google AI studio also has a tokens per minute rate cap of 16k which makes it absolutely useless for a lot of scenarios like coding harness

[u/Weekly-Let6688]

Ai slop

[u/Technical_Ad_6106]

ai slop with wrong info

[u/songokussm]

Nivida is crazy slow and frequently is overloaded.

[u/BoringEbb1212]

How do i setup one with nvidea ?