Free AI APIs That Actually Work in 2026 (No Credit Card)

Published August 25, 2026 · 5 min read

Most "free AI API" articles list trials that expire in 24 hours or caps of a few dozen requests. This is the short list of what is actually free in late August 2026 — verified today, no card required for any of it.

1. Genuinely free: glm-4.6v-flash (vision, unlimited)

Z.AI's glm-4.6v-flash is served at $0 per token with no daily quota — a real vision-language model you can point at screenshots, invoices and product photos all day. For document parsing and image QA pipelines, this is currently the best $0 endpoint on the market.

from openai import OpenAI
client = OpenAI(api_key="sk-novai-...", base_url="https://aiapi-pro.com/v1")
r = client.chat.completions.create(
    model="glm-4.6v-flash",
    messages=[{"role": "user", "content": [
        {"type": "text", "text": "Extract the total and date from this invoice."},
        {"type": "image_url", "image_url": {"url": "https://example.com/inv.png"}},
    ]}],
)

2. $2 trial credit: enough for real testing

Every new NovAI account gets $2.00 of free credit (14 days), no card. What that actually buys:

Workload	Cost	Runs on $2
qwen3.5-flash chat (800 in / 300 out)	~$0.00015/call	~13,000 calls
deepseek-v4-pro (same shape)	~$0.0011/call	~1,800 calls
Seedance video, 480p 5s	$0.70/clip	2 clips

Trial accounts can render one 480p/5s video per day; a first top-up of $1+ removes the cap and unlocks 720p and 15-second clips.

3. The sub-$0.10 tier for everything else

When the credit runs out, the floor price for a production-grade text model is $0.063 per million input tokens (qwen3.5-flash) — a month of hobby-project traffic typically costs under a dollar. Full numbers are in our cheapest-LLM ranking.

The honest summary: truly-free, unlimited AI APIs only exist at the small-model tier — but $2 of credit goes further on these price lists than most people expect.

Try it free on NovAI

$2 free credit · no card required · OpenAI-compatible API

Start Free →

Or test it in the playground →