Verified this week — Issue #16
Best free AI tools for Dev Infrastructure & AI APIs
Developer infrastructure hosts models, serverless AI, databases, and inference APIs with generous free tiers. Vercel, Supabase, Cloudflare Workers AI, Groq, Hugging Face, and Replicate credits power AI features in your apps. Essential for builders shipping LLM products on a shoestring.
Vercel
Free planFrontend cloud with AI SDK, v0, and serverless deployments.
Hobby $0/mo for personal projects
Supabase
Free planPostgres backend with auth, storage, vectors, and Edge Functions.
Free $0/month: 500 MB database, 50,000 MAUs, 2 active projects
Cloudflare Workers AI
Free planRun open models on Cloudflare edge with generous free allowance.
Workers Free $0: 100,000 requests/day
Hugging Face
Free planModel hub, Inference API free credits, and Spaces hosting.
Free CPU Basic Spaces and ZeroGPU access; PRO adds $2/month inference credits
GroqCloud
Free planUltra-fast inference API for open models like Llama and Mixtral.
Free Plan with per-model rate limits
Neon
Free planServerless Postgres with branching for dev and AI apps.
Free $0: 100 projects, 100 CU-hrs/project, 1 GB storage
Netlify
Free planJamstack hosting with AI-assisted deploys and serverless functions.
Free $0 forever
Railway
Free trialDeploy apps and databases with simple usage-based billing.
30-day free trial with $5 credits, then $1/month
Gemini API
Free planGoogle's Gemini API with a free tier for prototyping.
free tier: rate-limited Gemini API access via Google AI Studio
OpenRouter
Free planUnified API for hundreds of LLMs including free model variants.
free models with daily request limits
Cohere
Free planEnterprise LLMs, embeddings and rerank with a free trial key.
free trial API key: rate-limited, non-commercial use
NVIDIA NIM API
Free planTry and prototype with NVIDIA-hosted open models via API.
free: hosted inference endpoints for leading open models (rate-limited)
Cerebras Inference
Free planUltra-fast LLM inference API on Cerebras hardware.
free tier: daily token limits on open models
SambaNova Cloud
Free planFast inference API for open-source LLMs.
free tier with rate limits
Novita AI
Free planModel APIs and GPU cloud for AI developers.
Some models free to use (e.g. Apodex 1.1 Mini at $0 input/output)
Baseten
Free creditsInference platform for deploying and serving AI models.
free credits to start
Modal
Free creditsServerless GPU cloud for running AI code.
free monthly compute credits on Starter plan
Azure free account
Free creditsMicrosoft Azure free account with credits and always-free services.
free credit for 30 days plus free services
Google Cloud Free Program
Free creditsGoogle Cloud free trial credit and Free Tier products including Vertex AI.
free trial credits for new customers plus always-free products
AWS Free Tier
Free creditsAWS Free Tier with credits for Bedrock and other services.
free credits for new customers plus always-free services
Oracle Cloud Free Tier
Free planOracle Cloud Always Free resources and trial credits.
always-free services plus free trial credits
Alibaba Cloud Model Studio
Free creditsAPI access to Qwen models with free quota.
free token quota for new users
Z.ai API
Free planAPI for GLM models with free flash-tier models.
free models available via API
Voyage AI
Free planEmbedding and reranking models for retrieval.
free tokens per account for embeddings and rerankers
Pinecone
Free planServerless vector database for AI applications.
free Starter plan
Qdrant Cloud
Free planOpen-source vector database with a free managed cluster.
free 1GB cluster forever
Weaviate
Free planOpen-source vector database with hybrid search.
Free Forever $0/mo managed database; no credit card required
Chroma
Free creditsOpen-source search and retrieval database for AI.
free credits on Chroma Cloud; open source free
Zilliz Cloud
Free planManaged Milvus vector database.
free plan: serverless clusters
Upstash
Free planServerless Redis, vector and messaging with free tiers.
free tier for Redis, Vector and QStash
Redis Cloud
Free planManaged Redis with vector search for AI apps.
free 30MB database
MongoDB Atlas
Free planCloud database with vector search.
free M0 cluster with 512MB storage
Turso
Free planSQLite for production with edge replicas and vector search.
free plan: databases and storage included
CockroachDB
Free planDistributed SQL database with vector support.
free Basic tier usage allowance
Firebase
Free planGoogle's app backend with Gemini AI Logic, auth and database.
free Spark plan
Appwrite
Free planOpen-source backend platform for web and mobile apps.
free plan for hobby projects
Nhost
Free planOpen-source Firebase alternative with Postgres and GraphQL.
free starter project
Render
Free planCloud hosting for apps, APIs and databases.
free instances for web services and Postgres
Koyeb
Free planServerless platform for apps and GPU inference.
free instance for one web service
Deno Deploy
Free planServerless JavaScript hosting at the edge.
free plan with monthly requests
Sentry
Free planError monitoring with AI-powered debugging.
free Developer plan
Langfuse
Free planOpen-source LLM observability and evals.
free Hobby plan; open source self-host
Helicone
Free planOpen-source LLM observability and gateway.
free plan: monthly requests
Weights & Biases
Free planML experiment tracking and LLM evaluation with Weave.
free plan for personal projects
Portkey
Free planAI gateway, guardrails and observability.
free plan: monthly logs
Braintrust
Free planEvals and observability platform for AI products.
free plan for evals and logging
Arize Phoenix
Free planOpen-source LLM tracing and evaluation.
free: open-source and free cloud tier
Stability AI Platform
Free creditsAPI for Stable Diffusion image, video and audio models.
free credits for new accounts
Deepgram
Free creditsSpeech-to-text, text-to-speech and voice agent APIs.
free credit on signup
Gladia
Free creditsReal-time and async speech-to-text API.
Start with €50 free credits
Speechmatics
Free planAccurate speech-to-text API in 50+ languages.
free plan: monthly hours of transcription
Resend
Free planEmail API for developers.
free plan: 3,000 emails per month
Clerk
Free planAuthentication and user management for apps.
free plan: monthly active users included
Auth0
Free planIdentity platform with auth for AI agents.
free plan: up to 25,000 MAUs
Postman
Free planAPI platform with AI agent builder and Postbot.
free plan for individuals and small teams
Inngest
Free planDurable workflows and AI agent orchestration.
free Hobby plan: monthly executions
Trigger.dev
Free planBackground jobs and AI agent workflows in TypeScript.
free plan with monthly usage credit
Mango Inference
Free creditsOpenAI-compatible inference API for open frontier models.
$10 free credits on signup
Chutes
Free planDecentralized serverless inference for open models.
free tier: limited daily requests
Scaleway Generative APIs
Free creditsEuropean serverless LLM inference API.
free tokens for new users
OVHcloud AI Endpoints
Free planServerless AI model APIs hosted in Europe.
free with rate limits for anonymous use
Pollinations.ai
Free planFree, open-source generative AI API for text, images and audio.
free open API for text and image generation
Puter.js
Free planAdd free AI, cloud storage and auth to frontend apps without a backend.
free: user-pays model, no API key needed for developers
Firecrawl
Free planTurn websites into LLM-ready data with crawl and scrape APIs.
free plan: one-time credits
Tavily
Free planSearch API built for AI agents.
free plan: 1,000 API credits per month
Exa
Free creditsWeb search API for AI.
Start free with over $120 in credits per year
Serper
Free creditsFast Google search API.
2,500 free queries
Grafana Cloud
Free planObservability platform with AI assistant.
free forever plan
FAQ
Common questions
- Which free AI API is fastest for prototypes?
- Groq and Together offer low-latency free tiers for open models; rate limits apply.
- Can I host open models for free?
- Hugging Face Spaces and local Ollama are popular; cloud GPU free tiers are limited.
- Do serverless free tiers sleep when idle?
- Many PaaS free plans spin down after inactivity, causing cold starts on next request.