Everything you need to build, train, and deploy AI applications — without spending a dollar. This guide recommends the best free tier for each layer of an AI/ML development stack — 10 categories from LLM APIs to speech AI — with exact limits for each. Figures in the tables below come from our records for 1,574 developer tools.
Designed for solo AI developers, indie hackers, and startup teams prototyping AI features. Each recommendation includes alternatives, a "when you'll outgrow it" guide, and stability notes based on our tracking of 476 real pricing changes. The limits on this page were read from vendor pricing pages between 2026-07-10 and 2026-09-26.
$0/month
Total estimated monthly cost for prototyping and experimentation
$0 covers the 3 of 10 picks whose free tier our own badge still reads as active. It does not cover Groq (at risk), GitHub Copilot (at risk), Hugging Face (unrated — change refused), Roboflow (at risk), Langfuse (unrated — change not reconciled), Portkey (unrated — change not established), Deepgram (credits only).
Ultra-fast inference on LPU hardware — 30 RPM, 1,000 requests and 200K tokens a day per model, free. Serves gpt-oss-120b, gpt-oss-20b and Qwen3.8 27B. Best balance of speed, limits, and model quality for prototyping.
Fast LLM inference on Groq's LPU hardware. Free plan: gpt-oss-120b, gpt-oss-20b and Qwen3.8 27B, each at 30 requests a minute, 1,000 requests and 200,000 tokens a day, plus Whisper speech-to-text at 2,000 requests a…
When you'll outgrow it: When you exceed 30 RPM or 200K tokens a day on a model. At that point, OpenRouter (25+ free models) extends the free runway. Production apps typically need paid tiers for reliability SLAs.
2,000 completions/month free. VS Code native with deep GitHub integration. The simplest on-ramp to AI-assisted development.
AI coding assistant by GitHub. Copilot Free is $0 with no credit card: 2,000 code completions a month, a limited monthly allowance of GitHub AI Credits for chat and agent features, and models through auto model…
When you'll outgrow it: When you exceed 2,000 completions/month or need unlimited chat. Cline and Aider are free with your own API keys — no completion limits, just API costs.
2 GB storage with 5 indexes and 2M write units/month on the Starter plan. Serverless architecture means zero ops. The most popular vector DB with excellent SDK support.
Vector database. The Starter plan is free: up to 2 GB storage, 2M write units and 1M read units a month, 1 GB of egress a month (reads that return data stop at the cap until the next billing period), 5 indexes, 1…
When you'll outgrow it: When you exceed 2 GB storage or need more than 5 indexes. Qdrant Cloud's free cluster (1 GB RAM, 4 GB disk) is an alternative; Qdrant suspends it after a week without use.
Free cloud plan for personal development: up to 5 model seats, 5 GB/month of storage and 1 GB/month of Weave ingestion. Industry-standard experiment tracking.
ML experiment tracking, model registry, and LLM app tracing and evaluation (Weave). The cloud Free plan is $0/mo and designed for personal development, with up to 5 model seats, 5 GB/mo of storage and 1 GB/mo of Weave…
When you'll outgrow it: When you need more than 5 GB/month of storage or more than 5 model seats. W&B Pro starts at $60/month with a 30-day free trial.
Free inference API with $0.10/month credits and access to 200+ models. The largest open-source model hub — deploy models, share datasets, and collaborate on ML projects.
ML model hub. Free users get $0.10 a month of Inference Providers credits (subject to change); Inference Providers serves 200+ models, and extra usage requires a credits purchase. PRO ($9/month) gets $2.00 a month. Free…
When you'll outgrow it: When you need dedicated endpoints or higher throughput. Free users get $0.10 a month of Inference Providers credits — production apps can use Inference Endpoints (dedicated, from $0.033/hour).
A weekly quota of 30 GPU hours (one P100 or two T4s) and up to 20 TPU hours, at no charge. Integrated datasets and community notebooks.
Google's data science platform with free notebooks, datasets and competitions. Notebooks get a weekly GPU quota of 30 hours, sometimes more depending on demand (one NVIDIA Tesla P100 or two Tesla T4s), and a TPU v3-8…
When you'll outgrow it: When you need longer sessions (Kaggle caps them at 12 hours on CPU or GPU and 9 on TPU), more VRAM (T4 = 16 GB), or persistent storage. Google Colab offers T4 free but with session time limits.
Free Core plan: 10 credits that refresh every month, private projects and models, and model weight download. Best for computer vision projects with built-in model training and deployment.
Computer vision platform for labeling, training and deploying models. On September 18, 2026 Roboflow announced a free tier for its Core plan: 10 credits that refresh every month, private projects and models, and model…
RecommendedLangfuseFreeunrated — change not reconciled
50K units/month free on Cloud Hobby (traces, observations and scores each count), all platform features with limits, 30 days of data access, open-source. Trace LLM calls, evaluate outputs, manage prompts, and debug chains — the emerging standard for LLM ops.
Open-source LLM engineering platform for tracing, evaluating and debugging AI applications. The Langfuse Cloud Hobby plan is free with no credit card: 50k units a month (each trace, observation and score counts as one…
When you'll outgrow it: When you exceed 50K units/month; Langfuse Core is $29/month with 100K units. Langtrace (50K traces/month) and LangWatch (1K traces/month) are alternatives. For production, self-host Langfuse (open-source) for unlimited traces.
RecommendedPortkeyFreeunrated — change not established
10,000 requests/month free. AI gateway with load balancing, fallbacks, semantic caching, and 200+ LLM providers. Route between models for cost optimization.
Control panel for Gen AI apps featuring an observability suite & an AI gateway. Send & log up to 10,000 requests for free every month.
When you'll outgrow it: When you exceed 10K requests/month. Keywords AI also offers 10K requests/month free. For self-hosted, LiteLLM (open-source) has no limits.
When you'll outgrow it: When you exhaust $200 credits. AssemblyAI offers $50 free credits (~185 hrs). For ongoing free usage, Whisper (open-source) can run locally via Hugging Face.
Recent pricing changes affecting vendors in this stack. Based on our tracking of 476 deal changes across 1,574+ developer tools.
pricing restructuredGitHub Copilot: Premium request model introduced across all tiers. Free: 50/mo, Pro: 300, Pro+: 1,500, Business: 300/user, Enterprise: 1,000/user. Overag... Source ↗
pricing restructuredCursor: Cursor moved Pro from 500 requests a month to usage-based pricing and introduced a $200/month Ultra tier. Source ↗
new free tierGitHub Copilot: GitHub launched Copilot Free tier — AI code completion available to all GitHub users at no cost. 2,000 completions and 50 chat messages p... Source ↗
restrictionGoogle Gemini API: Billing-account-level spend caps enforced starting April 1, 2026. When a tier's spend cap is reached, API requests pause until the next b... Source ↗
rebrandedKeywords AI: Rebranded to Respan, free tier preserved We hold no source for this record, so it does not set Keywords AI's rating.
restrictionGitHub Copilot: Student plan now managed under dedicated 'GitHub Copilot Student' plan. Premium models (GPT-5.4, Claude Opus, Claude Sonnet) removed from... Source ↗
product deprecatedGoogle Gemini API: Gemini 2.0 Flash and 2.0 Flash-Lite were shut down on 2026-06-01, as Google announced on 2026-02-18. Google names gemini-3.6-flash as the... Source ↗
restrictionGitHub Copilot: No longer in force (2026-09-02). GitHub paused new Copilot Pro trials due to abuse. Existing trials continued through their term. New use... Source ↗
restrictionGitHub Copilot: No longer in force (2026-06-17). GitHub paused new signups for Copilot Pro, Pro+, and Copilot Student plans citing infrastructure strain ... Source ↗
restrictionGitHub Copilot: No longer in force (2026-09-01). GitHub paused new self-serve signups for Copilot Business by organizations on GitHub Free and GitHub Tea... Source ↗
pricing restructuredGitHub Copilot: GitHub retired premium requests and now bills every Copilot plan in GitHub AI Credits. Copilot Free kept 2,000 code completions a month, ... Source ↗
limits reducedRoboflow: Roboflow's free Public plan went from "$60/mo free credits" to "15 credits / month" between the Internet Archive's 2026-06-23 and 2026-07... Source ↗
Observability volume (Langfuse 50K units/month) — high-traffic AI apps with detailed tracing
The good news: the open-source alternatives above have no limits. Ollama + Chroma + MLflow + Langfuse (self-hosted) gives you a complete local AI stack at zero ongoing cost.
Need general SaaS infrastructure too? See our Free Startup Stack for hosting, databases, auth, and more. Or search our full index of 1,574+ developer deals.
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claude mcp add agentdeals -- npx -y agentdeals
Works with Claude Desktop, Cursor, Cline, Windsurf → Full setup guide