NVIDIA NIM free tier includes Free inference endpoints on build.nvidia.com: models marked Free Endpoint, including DeepSeek… Verified November 2026. Compare with 27 alternatives in AI / ML.

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NVIDIA NIM Free Tier 2026

stable

Subtypes in AI / ML: llm_api — the vendor runs language or multimodal models on its own infrastructure and sells calls to them by model name; you send a prompt and receive a completion. We read that on 2026-09-01 from https://build.nvidia.com, where it says: “Experience the leading models to build enterprise generative AI apps now” How we use this.

Limits, pricing history, and 27 alternatives. Verified November 2026. Last updated 2026-11-02.

NVIDIA NIM's free tier offers Free inference endpoints on build.nvidia.com: models marked Free Endpoint, including DeepSeek V4.1 Flash, GLM… We rate it stable. None of the 3 recorded changes narrowed the terms. Best for ai / ml workloads — 27 alternatives available.

One of 89 AI / ML services we track. See our full AI / ML Free Tier Comparison →
⚠️ Pricing change: NVIDIA's free API endpoints keep running, and GLM 5.3 Flash (z-ai/glm-5.3-flash) is not affected. GLM 5.3 (z-ai/glm-5.3) can be called on NVIDIA's free endpoints until October 27, 2026; NVIDIA's model page says it will be deprecated on 10/27/2026 and no longer supported after 10/28/2026. Source ↗ (effective 2026-10-27) View in changelog →
Tier
Free
Category
AI / ML
Pricing Page
https://build.nvidia.com/api/runtime/content/help-center-faq.yaml
Verified
2026-11-02
Last read
2026-11-02
The day we last read the vendor's page, and the day we last confirmed the terms we publish.

Free Tier Details

Free inference endpoints on build.nvidia.com: models marked Free Endpoint, including DeepSeek V4.1 Flash, GLM 5.3 Flash, gpt-oss-20b, Gemma 4 31B and NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Ultra, can be called at no cost. Their model IDs are deepseek-ai/deepseek-v4.1-flash, z-ai/glm-5.3-flash, openai/gpt-oss-20b, google/gemma-4-31b-it and nvidia/nemotron-3-ultra-550b-a55b. Mistral Large 4 (mistralai/mistral-large-4-1t-a52b) is a Free Endpoint on build.nvidia.com as of 2026-10-29. NVIDIA's free embedding models are nvidia/nemotron-3-embed-1b, nvidia/nemotron-3.5-embed-1b and nvidia/nemotron-3.5-embed-8b. The free reranking model is nvidia/nemotron-3.5-rerank-8b. The 3.5 models handle text and document images and were added on 2026-10-20. Up to 40 requests per minute; limits may vary by model, and traffic from other users may cause throttling. NVIDIA's API Trial Terms allow free use for testing and evaluation only, not production. NVIDIA posts an end-of-life date on each hosted model's page on build.nvidia.com; after that date, requests for the model return HTTP 410 Gone. NVIDIA stopped supporting NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Super (nvidia/nemotron-3-super-120b-a12b) after 2026-10-19, and its catalogue no longer lists the model (checked 2026-10-21). Nemotron 3.5 Super VL (nvidia/nemotron-3.5-super-vl-120b-a12b), an early-access model, is a Free Endpoint. NVIDIA retired Kimi K3 (moonshotai/kimi-k3) on 2026-10-15. Other model IDs NVIDIA retired in 2026 include these. DeepSeek: deepseek-ai/deepseek-v4-pro and deepseek-ai/deepseek-v4-flash on 2026-08-07, deepseek-ai/deepseek-v4-pro-0813 on 2026-09-14 and deepseek-ai/deepseek-v4-flash-0731 on 2026-09-21. Kimi: moonshotai/kimi-k2-instruct and moonshotai/kimi-k2-thinking on 2026-05-12. GLM: z-ai/glm4.7 on 2026-05-14, z-ai/glm-5.1 on 2026-07-02, z-ai/glm-5.2 on 2026-08-21 and z-ai/glm-5.3 on 2026-10-27 (GLM 5.3 Flash, z-ai/glm-5.3-flash, is still a Free Endpoint). Qwen: qwen/qwen2.5-coder-32b-instruct on 2026-05-12, qwen/qwen3-next-80b-a3b-thinking on 2026-05-21, qwen/qwen3-coder-480b-a35b-instruct on 2026-06-11, qwen/qwen3.5-122b-a10b on 2026-07-20, and qwen/qwen3.5-397b-a17b and qwen/qwen3-next-80b-a3b-instruct on 2026-07-27. MiniMax: minimaxai/minimax-m2.5 on 2026-05-12, minimaxai/minimax-m2.7 on 2026-07-27 and minimaxai/minimax-m3 on 2026-09-09. gpt-oss: openai/gpt-oss-120b on 2026-09-03. Llama: meta/llama-3.2-11b-vision-instruct on 2026-11-05, meta/llama-4-maverick-17b-128e-instruct on 2026-07-27, and meta/llama-3.3-70b-instruct, meta/llama-3.1-8b-instruct, meta/llama-3.1-70b-instruct, meta/llama-3.2-1b-instruct and meta/llama-3.2-3b-instruct on 2026-08-26. Nemotron: nvidia/llama-3.3-nemotron-super-49b-v1, nvidia/llama-3.3-nemotron-super-49b-v1.5, nvidia/llama-3.1-nemotron-nano-8b-v1, nvidia/llama-3.1-nemotron-nano-vl-8b-v1, nvidia/nvidia-nemotron-nano-9b-v2, nvidia/nemotron-nano-12b-v2-vl and nvidia/nemotron-mini-4b-instruct on 2026-08-26, and nvidia/nemotron-3-nano-30b-a3b on 2026-09-01. Mistral: mistralai/mistral-large-3-675b-instruct-2512 on 2026-07-23, mistralai/mixtral-8x7b-instruct-v0.1 on 2026-07-27 and mistralai/mistral-nemotron on 2026-09-28. Gemma: google/diffusiongemma-26b-a4b-it on 2026-11-12, google/gemma-3-27b-it on 2026-05-12, and google/gemma-3n-e4b-it and google/gemma-3n-e2b-it on 2026-07-27. Phi: microsoft/phi-4-mini-instruct and microsoft/phi-4-multimodal-instruct on 2026-07-15. Others: stepfun-ai/step-3.5-flash, bytedance/seed-oss-36b-instruct, sarvamai/sarvam-m and abacusai/dracarys-llama-3.1-70b-instruct on 2026-07-27. Embedding models: nvidia/llama-3.2-nv-embedqa-1b-v2 and nvidia/llama-3.2-nemoretriever-300m-embed-v1 on 2026-05-18, and nvidia/nv-embedqa-e5-v5, nvidia/nv-embed-v1, nvidia/llama-nemotron-embed-1b-v2 and baai/bge-m3 on 2026-08-25.

We read that on 2026-11-02 from https://build.nvidia.com/api/runtime/content/help-center-faq.yaml, and our check recorded: the page names NVIDIA NIM as "nim" and states "40 requests per minute".

From build.nvidia.com/api/runtime/content/help-center-faq.yaml, read 2026-11-02:
The free tier runs on rate limits - up to 40 requests per minute (RPM) for most models, with no per-token billing.

When You'll Outgrow NVIDIA NIM's Free Tier

Pricing Change History (3 recorded)

deprecated effective 2026-10-27 low impact
NVIDIA's free API endpoints keep running, and GLM 5.3 Flash (z-ai/glm-5.3-flash) is not affected. GLM 5.3 (z-ai/glm-5.3) can be called on NVIDIA's free endpoints until October 27, 2026; NVIDIA's model page says it will be deprecated on 10/27/2026 and no longer supported after 10/28/2026. Source ↗
Before: GLM 5.3 (z-ai/glm-5.3) could be called at no cost on NVIDIA's free inference endpoints, with no end date.
After: NVIDIA's model page says the GLM 5.3 API will be deprecated on 10/27/2026 and will no longer be supported after 10/28/2026.
deprecated effective 2026-10-19 low impact
NVIDIA's free API endpoints keep running. NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Super (nvidia/nemotron-3-super-120b-a12b) can be called on NVIDIA's free endpoints until October 19, 2026; NVIDIA's model page says it will no longer be supported after 10/19/2026. Source ↗
Before: NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Super (nvidia/nemotron-3-super-120b-a12b) could be called at no cost on NVIDIA's free inference endpoints, with no end date.
After: NVIDIA's model page says the Nemotron 3 Super API will be deprecated on 10/19/2026 and will no longer be supported after 10/19/2026.
deprecated effective 2026-10-15 low impact
NVIDIA's free API endpoints keep running. NVIDIA retired Kimi K3 (moonshotai/kimi-k3) from its free endpoints on build.nvidia.com on October 15, 2026; its model page says it is no longer supported after 10/15/2026. Source ↗
Before: Kimi K3 (moonshotai/kimi-k3) could be called at no cost on NVIDIA's free inference endpoints.
After: NVIDIA's model page says Kimi K3 was deprecated on 10/14/2026 and is no longer supported after 10/15/2026; NVIDIA's API answers calls to it with HTTP 410.

View all 513 pricing changes across all vendors →

Alternatives in AI / ML

How NVIDIA NIM compares against every one of the 27 we list, not against a selection of them. A surface with room for every member of a tied set may rotate their order. A surface with room for only some of them names none of them, because which ones it named would be the claim, and a claim seeded on the date is not the one we serve tomorrow. How we decide this.

Service Free Tier Stability
NVIDIA NIM Free stable
Hugging Face Free
ML model hub. Since 2026-10-07, free accounts get no included Inference Providers credits: free users buy credits or upgrade to PRO to call Inference Providers, which serves 200+ models.
 caution
Maxim AI Free
Simulate, evaluate, and observe your AI agents — The 'OSS' tier is free forever for developers, small teams, and self-managed deployments. It includes features like a drop-in replacement, OTel compatibility, metrics & traces, built-in observability, budget management, and more.
 stable
Pollinations.AI Free
Keyless Classic API: one image model and GPT-OSS 20B text, free, no sign-up, rate-limited per IP. Every other model needs an API key and Pollen, and free Pollen comes only from quests.
 caution
OpenRouter Free
AI model router. Free plan: 50 requests a day, no BYOK.
 stable
Hetzner Inference API Free
Hetzner's experimental Inference API: an OpenAI-compatible API for open-weight models, free while it stays experimental. Base URL: https://inference.hetzner.com/api/v1.
 stable
Lumenfall.ai Free
AI media gateway: one OpenAI-compatible API to image and video generation models from several providers, billed at each provider's price with no markup, platform fee or subscription. One model, FLUX.1 [schnell] FP8, is listed free per image ("Free to try", served through Fireworks AI).
 stable
Cohere Free
AI model API for Command chat models, Embed, Rerank, Transcribe and Parse. Every account starts with a Trial API key: calls made with it are free and limited to 1,000 API calls a month.
 stable
LLM7.io Free
LLM inference gateway. With a free token from dash.llm7.io: 1 request a second, 60 a minute, 250 an hour and 100,000 tokens per 24 hours, counting input and output tokens; LLM7 says free quotas may be reduced without notice.
 caution
Cloudflare Workers AI Free
Workers AI runs AI models on Cloudflare's global network. Every account gets 10,000 Neurons per day at no charge, reset daily at 00:00 UTC; on the Workers Free plan, requests beyond that fail until the reset.
 caution
Groq Free
Fast LLM inference on Groq's LPU hardware. Free plan: gpt-oss-20b, gpt-oss-120b 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 day.
 caution
Keywords AI Free
Rebranded to Respan; keywordsai.co redirects to respan.ai. Free plan: full platform, 100k logs, 1k scores, 5 datasets, 2 evaluators, 5 prompts.
 source unconfirmed
Google Gemini API Free (Reduced)
Free tier: Gemini 4 Hydrogen, Gemini 3.8 Flash, 3.6 Flash, 3.5 Flash-Lite, 3.1 Flash-Lite, Gemini 3 Flash Preview, Gemini Embedding 2 and Gemma 4 are free of charge. Also free of charge are Gemini 3.8 Live (real-time voice), Gemini 3.5 Live Translate (translation), Gemini 3.5 Transcribe…
 stable
SiliconFlow Free
Pay-as-you-go model inference. siliconflow.cn, run by a Beijing company, lists these models at no charge: the chat models Qwen3-8B, Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct (Free), Qwen3.5-4B, GLM-4-9B-0414, GLM-Z1-9B-0414, DeepSeek-R1-0528-Qwen3-8B (Free) and Xing4.0-29B; the translation model Hunyuan-MT-7B; the OCR…
 unrated
Zhipu AI Free
China-based GLM model API. The price list marks these models free: GLM-4.7-Flash, GLM-4-Flash-250414 and GLM-Z1-Flash (text); GLM-4.6V-Flash, GLM-4V-Flash and GLM-4.1V-Thinking-Flash (vision); CogView-3-Flash (image); CogVideoX-Flash (video).
 source unconfirmed
Portkey Free
Control panel for Gen AI apps featuring an observability suite & an AI gateway. Send & log up to 10,000 requests for free every month.
 unrated
Fireworks AI Free Credits
Inference platform for open models, with serverless per-token pricing and on-demand GPU deployments billed per GPU second. Fireworks offers $1 in free credits to get started.
 unrated
Baseten Basic (Free Credits)
ML model deployment platform. New workspaces receive credits for testing and deployment; Baseten does not state the amount.
 unrated
Cerebras Trial
Ultra-fast LLM inference API — no permanent free tier. New accounts get $5 in free credits after adding a verified payment method, expiring 30 days after they are granted.
 risky
DeepSeek API Pay-as-you-go
Pay-as-you-go LLM API with no free tier, billed from a prepaid balance. DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash (deepseek-flash): $0.30/M input, $1.20/M output at peak.
 unrated
Anthropic API Pay-as-you-go
Claude API with usage-based pricing per million tokens (input/output). Claude Fable 5.2 $8/$40.
 unrated
OpenAI Pay-as-you-go
AI API platform. One model is priced Free in OpenAI's own table: the moderation model omni-moderation-latest.
 unrated
xAI Pay-as-you-go
Grok API, pay as you go: sign up at console.x.ai, then load it with credits. grok-4.7 $2.00/$6.00 (per 1M tokens, under 200k prompt tokens).
 unrated
MiniMax Pay-as-you-go
MiniMax sells API access pay-as-you-go on platform.minimax.io. Its pricing pages list no free API allowance; one docs page mentions a free quota for new pay-as-you-go users but gives no amount.
 unrated
Mistral AI Pay-as-you-go
Since about 2026-11-05, Mistral's Free plan covers Vibe and Studio and does not include API access. Creating API keys and calling the API require billing activation and pay-as-you-go with prepaid credits.
 unrated
Ollama Cloud Pay-as-you-go
Cloud-hosted Ollama for running open-source LLMs. Between October 26 and 27, 2026, Ollama replaced its Free plan, which included starter usage credits, with a $0 Pay as you go plan.
 unrated
Together AI Pay-as-you-go
Inference API for open-source models, billed per token. Together AI does not currently offer free trials; access requires a minimum $15 credit purchase for an organization's first purchase ($5 for later purchases), and the platform is fully prepaid.
 unrated
GitHub Models Retired
GitHub retired GitHub Models on 2026-07-30, so there is no free tier. GitHub's own documentation states "GitHub Models has been retired."
 source unconfirmed

Left out of this list: Brave Search API (shares no subtype with this product), Pinecone (shares no subtype with this product), Qdrant (shares no subtype with this product), Deepgram (shares no subtype with this product), Kaggle (shares no subtype with this product), Roboflow (shares no subtype with this product), Scale AI (shares no subtype with this product), AssemblyAI (shares no subtype with this product), Replicate (shares no subtype with this product), Weights & Biases (shares no subtype with this product), Comet ML (shares no subtype with this product), Clarifai (we have not classified this record), Neptune.ai (we have not classified this record), Labelbox (shares no subtype with this product), Google Colab (shares no subtype with this product), Composio (shares no subtype with this product), DeepAR (none of this category's subtypes apply), OCR.Space (shares no subtype with this product), Parseur (shares no subtype with this product), Reducto (shares no subtype with this product), SerpApi (shares no subtype with this product), Tavily AI (shares no subtype with this product), paperspace (shares no subtype with this product), Arize AX (shares no subtype with this product), Audio Enhancer (none of this category's subtypes apply), Braintrust (shares no subtype with this product), Clair (none of this category's subtypes apply), Langfuse (shares no subtype with this product), LangSmith (shares no subtype with this product), Langtrace (we have not classified this record), LangWatch (shares no subtype with this product), Mediaworkbench.ai (none of this category's subtypes apply), Othor AI (none of this category's subtypes apply), ReportGPT (none of this category's subtypes apply), Zenable (none of this category's subtypes apply), Exa (shares no subtype with this product), GPU-Bridge (we have not classified this record), Google Vertex AI Agent Engine (we have not classified this record), Google Vector Search 2.0 (shares no subtype with this product), Google Gemini Embedding 2 (shares no subtype with this product), Alibaba Cloud Qwen Code (none of this category's subtypes apply), E2B (shares no subtype with this product), Modal (shares no subtype with this product), ElevenLabs (we have not classified this record), Stability AI (we have not classified this record), Daytona (shares no subtype with this product), Blaxel (shares no subtype with this product), Novita Sandbox (shares no subtype with this product), Runloop (shares no subtype with this product), Mem0 (shares no subtype with this product), Zep (shares no subtype with this product), Letta (we have not classified this record), Supermemory (shares no subtype with this product), Cognee (shares no subtype with this product), Serper (shares no subtype with this product), Linkup (shares no subtype with this product), Parallel (shares no subtype with this product), Jina AI (shares no subtype with this product), You.com (shares no subtype with this product), Cloudflare AI Search (we have not classified this record), Valyu (shares no subtype with this product). Each is still listed in AI / ML, with the vendor's own words we read that from on its page. How we decide this.

See full comparison →

Recompute today's order yourself. The order above is a permutation seeded only on the UTC date and the query key — no vendor name, slug, id or offer field is an input. The list above is every one of the 27 entries in that order, not a prefix of it. The algorithm is published, so anyone can reproduce this page's order without asking us.
date
2026-11-14
query_key
alternatives:AI / ML:NVIDIA NIM
seed
6c31bb789a9c51697091ef495c9d87b9ea1543929c573703e1222fa4a82556b9
tie_count
12

Featured in Monthly Reports

October 2026 Report

Watch NVIDIA NIM for Pricing Changes

We do not push notifications. Every change we record is readable the moment it lands, and the JSON answer carries an ETag — send it back as If-None-Match and an unchanged answer costs one 304.

curl https://agentdeals.dev/api/changes?vendor=NVIDIA%20NIM curl https://agentdeals.dev/pricing-changes/feed.xml?vendor=NVIDIA%20NIM

API docs →

Related Guides

AI / ML Free Tier Comparison AI / ML Alternatives Guide Setup Guide Stability Dashboard

Frequently Asked Questions

Is NVIDIA NIM free?
Yes, NVIDIA NIM offers a free tier: Free. Free inference endpoints on build.nvidia.com: models marked Free Endpoint, including DeepSeek V4.1 Flash, GLM 5.3 Flash, gpt-oss-20b, Gemma 4 31B and NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Ultra, can be called at no cost....
What is NVIDIA NIM's free tier?
NVIDIA NIM's free tier is called "Free". Free inference endpoints on build.nvidia.com: models marked Free Endpoint, including DeepSeek V4.1 Flash, GLM 5.3 Flash, gpt-oss-20b, Gemma 4 31B and NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Ultra, can be called at no cost. Their model IDs are deepseek-ai/deepseek-v4.1-flash, z-ai/glm-5.3-flash, openai/gpt-oss-20b, google/gemma-4-31b-it and nvidia/nemotron-3-ultra-550b-a55b. Mistral Large 4 (mistralai/mistral-large-4-1t-a52b) is a Free Endpoint on build.nvidia.com as of 2026-10-29. NVIDIA's free embedding models are nvidia/nemotron-3-embed-1b, nvidia/nemotron-3.5-embed-1b and nvidia/nemotron-3.5-embed-8b. The free reranking model is nvidia/nemotron-3.5-rerank-8b. The 3.5 models handle text and document images and were added on 2026-10-20. Up to 40 requests per minute; limits may vary by model, and traffic from other users may cause throttling. NVIDIA's API Trial Terms allow free use for testing and evaluation only, not production. NVIDIA posts an end-of-life date on each hosted model's page on build.nvidia.com; after that date, requests for the model return HTTP 410 Gone. NVIDIA stopped supporting NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Super (nvidia/nemotron-3-super-120b-a12b) after 2026-10-19, and its catalogue no longer lists the model (checked 2026-10-21). Nemotron 3.5 Super VL (nvidia/nemotron-3.5-super-vl-120b-a12b), an early-access model, is a Free Endpoint. NVIDIA retired Kimi K3 (moonshotai/kimi-k3) on 2026-10-15. Other model IDs NVIDIA retired in 2026 include these. DeepSeek: deepseek-ai/deepseek-v4-pro and deepseek-ai/deepseek-v4-flash on 2026-08-07, deepseek-ai/deepseek-v4-pro-0813 on 2026-09-14 and deepseek-ai/deepseek-v4-flash-0731 on 2026-09-21. Kimi: moonshotai/kimi-k2-instruct and moonshotai/kimi-k2-thinking on 2026-05-12. GLM: z-ai/glm4.7 on 2026-05-14, z-ai/glm-5.1 on 2026-07-02, z-ai/glm-5.2 on 2026-08-21 and z-ai/glm-5.3 on 2026-10-27 (GLM 5.3 Flash, z-ai/glm-5.3-flash, is still a Free Endpoint). Qwen: qwen/qwen2.5-coder-32b-instruct on 2026-05-12, qwen/qwen3-next-80b-a3b-thinking on 2026-05-21, qwen/qwen3-coder-480b-a35b-instruct on 2026-06-11, qwen/qwen3.5-122b-a10b on 2026-07-20, and qwen/qwen3.5-397b-a17b and qwen/qwen3-next-80b-a3b-instruct on 2026-07-27. MiniMax: minimaxai/minimax-m2.5 on 2026-05-12, minimaxai/minimax-m2.7 on 2026-07-27 and minimaxai/minimax-m3 on 2026-09-09. gpt-oss: openai/gpt-oss-120b on 2026-09-03. Llama: meta/llama-3.2-11b-vision-instruct on 2026-11-05, meta/llama-4-maverick-17b-128e-instruct on 2026-07-27, and meta/llama-3.3-70b-instruct, meta/llama-3.1-8b-instruct, meta/llama-3.1-70b-instruct, meta/llama-3.2-1b-instruct and meta/llama-3.2-3b-instruct on 2026-08-26. Nemotron: nvidia/llama-3.3-nemotron-super-49b-v1, nvidia/llama-3.3-nemotron-super-49b-v1.5, nvidia/llama-3.1-nemotron-nano-8b-v1, nvidia/llama-3.1-nemotron-nano-vl-8b-v1, nvidia/nvidia-nemotron-nano-9b-v2, nvidia/nemotron-nano-12b-v2-vl and nvidia/nemotron-mini-4b-instruct on 2026-08-26, and nvidia/nemotron-3-nano-30b-a3b on 2026-09-01. Mistral: mistralai/mistral-large-3-675b-instruct-2512 on 2026-07-23, mistralai/mixtral-8x7b-instruct-v0.1 on 2026-07-27 and mistralai/mistral-nemotron on 2026-09-28. Gemma: google/diffusiongemma-26b-a4b-it on 2026-11-12, google/gemma-3-27b-it on 2026-05-12, and google/gemma-3n-e4b-it and google/gemma-3n-e2b-it on 2026-07-27. Phi: microsoft/phi-4-mini-instruct and microsoft/phi-4-multimodal-instruct on 2026-07-15. Others: stepfun-ai/step-3.5-flash, bytedance/seed-oss-36b-instruct, sarvamai/sarvam-m and abacusai/dracarys-llama-3.1-70b-instruct on 2026-07-27. Embedding models: nvidia/llama-3.2-nv-embedqa-1b-v2 and nvidia/llama-3.2-nemoretriever-300m-embed-v1 on 2026-05-18, and nvidia/nv-embedqa-e5-v5, nvidia/nv-embed-v1, nvidia/llama-nemotron-embed-1b-v2 and baai/bge-m3 on 2026-08-25. NVIDIA records prompts and outputs from free API use to improve its products and services, including AI models. Do not send confidential information or personal data unless expressly permitted. (From https://assets.ngc.nvidia.com/products/api-catalog/legal/NVIDIA%20API%20Trial%20Terms%20of%20Service.pdf, read 2026-10-10.) Using the API in production, or after the trial credits are used up, needs a separate subscription from NVIDIA or a third-party provider. (From https://assets.ngc.nvidia.com/products/api-catalog/legal/NVIDIA%20API%20Trial%20Terms%20of%20Service.pdf, read 2026-10-06.) Production use of NIM needs an NVIDIA AI Enterprise license. The 1-year list price is $4,500 per GPU. The cloud pay-as-you-go rate is $1 per hour per GPU plus the cloud service provider's instance cost. (From https://docs.nvidia.com/ai-enterprise/planning-resource/licensing-guide/latest/pricing.html, read 2026-10-29.) NVIDIA Developer Program members may run downloadable NIM microservices free for research, application development, and experimentation on up to 16 GPUs. Infrastructure may be cloud, data center, or personal workstation. (From https://docs.api.nvidia.com/nim/docs/product, read 2026-10-29.) The free NVIDIA AI Enterprise trial is 90 days long. It covers production deployments and commercial use. (From https://docs.api.nvidia.com/nim/docs/product, read 2026-10-29.) The free API service may be pre-release with reduced availability. It has no uptime guarantee and is not for production use. NVIDIA may end it at any time. (From https://assets.ngc.nvidia.com/products/api-catalog/legal/NVIDIA%20API%20Trial%20Terms%20of%20Service.pdf, read 2026-11-05.) An API key is an NGC personal key with the Public API Endpoints service. You choose its expiration when you generate it: a preset period, a custom date, or never. (From https://docs.nvidia.com/ngc/latest/ngc-user-guide.html, read 2026-11-05.) Your rate limit is shown in the top-right of the build.nvidia.com dashboard. (From https://build.nvidia.com/api/runtime/content/help-center-faq.yaml, read 2026-11-05.) When you hit the rate limits, NVIDIA points you to the Deploy section of the model's page to use a partner's endpoint or run the NIM container yourself. (From https://build.nvidia.com/api/runtime/content/help-center-faq.yaml, read 2026-11-05.)
Is NVIDIA NIM's free tier reliable?
NVIDIA NIM's free tier is considered stable. None of the 3 recorded changes narrowed the terms. See the pricing history below.
Is NVIDIA NIM's free tier good for production?
No. NVIDIA NIM's free tier is not for production use, by NVIDIA NIM's own terms: "to use the API Service in production or to use the API Service after you have used your available Credits" (From assets.ngc.nvidia.com/products/api-catalog/legal/NVIDIA%20API%20Trial%20Terms%20of%20Service.pdf, read 2026-10-06.) We rate NVIDIA NIM's pricing stable. This rating is about how its terms have changed, not what they allow. None of the 3 recorded changes narrowed the terms. Consider free alternatives in AI / ML.
What changed in NVIDIA NIM's pricing?
NVIDIA NIM has had 3 recorded pricing changes. Most recently: NVIDIA's free API endpoints keep running, and GLM 5.3 Flash (z-ai/glm-5.3-flash) is not affected. GLM 5.3 (z-ai/glm-5.3) can be called on NVIDIA's free endpoints until October 27, 2026; NVIDIA's model page says it will be deprecated on 10/27/2026 and no longer supported after 10/28/2026. Source: https://build.nvidia.com/z-ai/glm-5-3 (2026-10-27).
What are the best free alternatives to NVIDIA NIM?
We publish no ranking of these. Nothing we record measures popularity or generosity, so naming a best or a top few would be our preference rather than our data. We hold 27 free alternatives to NVIDIA NIM in AI / ML, each listed above with its tier. Of those, 12 carry no recorded demerit and are indistinguishable under every signal we hold, so they are listed in an order that rotates daily, 6 are demoted with the reason named, 9 are listed last behind a stated gate. Our ranking rule is published at /criteria.
When will I outgrow NVIDIA NIM's free tier?
At 40 requests/min, you'll need to upgrade. When you outgrow the free tier, evaluate paid plans against alternatives — sometimes a competitor's free tier covers what you need.
What category is NVIDIA NIM in?
NVIDIA NIM is categorized under AI / ML on AgentDeals. We list 27 other AI / ML services alongside it, every one of them on this page with its free tier and the stability we publish for it.