Ollama Cloud free tier includes Cloud-hosted Ollama for running open-source LLMs — The Free plan costs $0 and includes starter… Catalogue date August 2026. Compare with 26 alternatives in AI / ML.

Ollama Cloud Free Tier 2026 caution

Why caution: effective between 2026-08-27 and 2026-09-01 — Ollama's Free plan now includes starter usage credits and starter models only; buying usage credits unlocks the other cloud models. Before, Free included cloud models with a usage limit. Source ↗ Full history ↓

A verdict here is not a fixed property of the vendor. A one-off pricing event demotes a vendor while its recorded date falls in the last 180 days and then lapses on its own, with nothing about the vendor having changed; a standing condition — a free tier withdrawn and not restored, a product retired — does not lapse with time. This one rests on a record effective between 2026-08-27 and 2026-09-01, so it lapses on 2027-03-01 unless we record something new first.

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://ollama.com, where it says: “Ollama lets you use open models with your coding agents” How we use this.

Limits, pricing history, and 26 alternatives. Catalogue date August 2026. Last updated 2026-10-06.

Ollama Cloud's free tier offers Cloud-hosted Ollama for running open-source LLMs — The Free plan costs $0 and includes starter usage credits… We rate it caution — one recorded pricing model change, effective between 2026-08-27 and 2026-09-01. Best for ai / ml workloads — 26 alternatives available.

One of 87 AI / ML services we track. See our full AI / ML Free Tier Comparison →

Tier

Free

Free Tier Details

Cloud-hosted Ollama for running open-source LLMs — The Free plan costs $0 and includes starter usage credits. Buying usage credits unlocks all models. It includes 1 concurrent request. Pro costs $20 a month with $60 of usage credits, Max $100 a month with $300. Team, in early access, costs $500 a month for unlimited users and includes $1,000 of usage credits a month, shared across the team. Per million input and output tokens, glm-5.3 costs $1.40 and $4.40, deepseek-v4-pro $1.32 and $3.96, and kimi-k3 $3.00 and $15.00. Usage is billed per million tokens at each model's rate, for example gpt-oss:120b at $0.15 input and $0.60 output, and some models, such as deepseek-v4.1-flash, cost half off-peak (outside 12:00 to 18:00 UTC on weekdays, and all weekend). To use cloud models without installing Ollama, send requests to https://ollama.com/api/chat with an API key from ollama.com in an "Authorization: Bearer" header, using the same model names, such as gpt-oss:120b; OpenAI and Anthropic clients also work.

We read that on 2026-10-06 from https://ollama.com/pricing, and our check recorded: the page writes "ollama", the domain we cite Ollama Cloud from, and states "$0". A source check reads the cited page for the service's name and a price; the limits above are from our own record.

From ollama.com/pricing, read 2026-10-06:

Free $0 Use any cloud model with pay-as-you-go usage credits. Includes: Run models locally Starter usage credits included Includes access to starter models Add credits to unlock all models

Ollama allows one account per person. A second free account is not allowed. (From ollama.com/pricing, read 2026-10-05.)
Free usage resets monthly from your sign-up date. Unused usage does not roll over. You can buy usage credits instead of waiting. (From ollama.com/pricing, read 2026-10-05.)
Ollama says cloud prompts and responses are never logged or used for training. (From ollama.com/pricing, read 2026-10-05.)
Models run mainly in the United States. Requests may be routed to Europe for capacity. (From ollama.com/pricing, read 2026-10-11.)
Purchased usage credits expire one year after they are added to the account. (From ollama.com/terms, read 2026-10-11.)
Requests beyond the 1 concurrent request wait in a queue. When the queue is full, new requests are rejected until a slot frees up. (From ollama.com/pricing, read 2026-10-05.)

When You'll Outgrow Ollama Cloud's Free Tier

When your usage exceeds the free tier limits, you'll need to upgrade.
At that point, the 26 alternatives in AI / ML are each listed with the free tier they offer, so you can compare what they give you against what you have outgrown.

Pricing Change History (1 recorded)

model change effective between 2026-08-27 and 2026-09-01 high impact

Ollama's Free plan now includes starter usage credits and starter models only; buying usage credits unlocks the other cloud models. Before, Free included cloud models with a usage limit. Source ↗

Before: Cloud-hosted Ollama for running open-source LLMs — free tier for light usage with 1 concurrent model. Access Llama, Mistral, Gemma, and other open models via API

After: The Free plan costs $0 and includes starter usage credits. Buying usage credits unlocks all models. It includes 1 concurrent request.

View all 454 pricing changes across all vendors →

Alternatives in AI / ML

How Ollama Cloud compares against every one of the 26 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
Ollama Cloud	Free	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-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 day.	caution
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
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
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.	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
NVIDIA NIM	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,…	stable
Google Gemini API	Free (Reduced) Free tier: 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 (speech-to-text), Gemini 3.8…	stable
Mistral AI	Free Mistral's Free plan includes monthly usage shared across Studio, the API and Vibe Code. The pricing page no longer states the amount as of 2026-10-07; it previously listed $10 a month in API credits.	caution
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
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
OpenRouter	Free AI model router. Free plan: 50 requests a day, no BYOK.	stable
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
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
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
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
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
Anthropic API	Pay-as-you-go Claude API with usage-based pricing per million tokens (input/output). Claude Fable 5.1 $10/$50.	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
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
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
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
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), Pollinations.AI (shares no subtype with this product), 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). 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 26 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: 2026-10-21
query_key: alternatives:AI / ML:Ollama Cloud
seed: 84fc1927a5bae18a7d0d3a19dcade914e7e5313549675955a0f7a4501548c11c
tie_count: 14

Watch Ollama Cloud 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=Ollama%20Cloud
curl https://agentdeals.dev/pricing-changes/feed.xml?vendor=Ollama%20Cloud

API docs →

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Ollama Cloud free?

Yes, Ollama Cloud offers a free tier: Free. Cloud-hosted Ollama for running open-source LLMs — The Free plan costs $0 and includes starter usage credits. Buying usage credits unlocks all models. It includes 1 concurrent request. Pro costs $20 a...

What is Ollama Cloud's free tier?

Ollama Cloud's free tier is called "Free". Cloud-hosted Ollama for running open-source LLMs — The Free plan costs $0 and includes starter usage credits. Buying usage credits unlocks all models. It includes 1 concurrent request. Pro costs $20 a month with $60 of usage credits, Max $100 a month with $300. Team, in early access, costs $500 a month for unlimited users and includes $1,000 of usage credits a month, shared across the team. Per million input and output tokens, glm-5.3 costs $1.40 and $4.40, deepseek-v4-pro $1.32 and $3.96, and kimi-k3 $3.00 and $15.00. Usage is billed per million tokens at each model's rate, for example gpt-oss:120b at $0.15 input and $0.60 output, and some models, such as deepseek-v4.1-flash, cost half off-peak (outside 12:00 to 18:00 UTC on weekdays, and all weekend). To use cloud models without installing Ollama, send requests to https://ollama.com/api/chat with an API key from ollama.com in an "Authorization: Bearer" header, using the same model names, such as gpt-oss:120b; OpenAI and Anthropic clients also work. Ollama allows one account per person. A second free account is not allowed. (From https://ollama.com/pricing, read 2026-10-05.) Free usage resets monthly from your sign-up date. Unused usage does not roll over. You can buy usage credits instead of waiting. (From https://ollama.com/pricing, read 2026-10-05.) Ollama says cloud prompts and responses are never logged or used for training. (From https://ollama.com/pricing, read 2026-10-05.) Models run mainly in the United States. Requests may be routed to Europe for capacity. (From https://ollama.com/pricing, read 2026-10-11.) Purchased usage credits expire one year after they are added to the account. (From https://ollama.com/terms, read 2026-10-11.) Requests beyond the 1 concurrent request wait in a queue. When the queue is full, new requests are rejected until a slot frees up. (From https://ollama.com/pricing, read 2026-10-05.)

Is Ollama Cloud's free tier reliable?

Ollama Cloud's free tier requires caution because of one specific recorded change, effective between 2026-08-27 and 2026-09-01: Ollama's Free plan now includes starter usage credits and starter models only; buying usage credits unlocks the other cloud models. Before, Free included cloud models with a usage limit. Source: https://ollama.com/pricing

Is Ollama Cloud's free tier good for production?

Ollama Cloud's free tier is usable for prototyping and development, but we rate it caution because of one recorded pricing model change, effective between 2026-08-27 and 2026-09-01. Consider alternatives with more stable pricing for critical services.

What changed in Ollama Cloud's pricing?

Ollama Cloud has had 1 recorded pricing change. Most recently: Ollama's Free plan now includes starter usage credits and starter models only; buying usage credits unlocks the other cloud models. Before, Free included cloud models with a usage limit. Source: https://ollama.com/pricing (effective between 2026-08-27 and 2026-09-01).

What are the best free alternatives to Ollama Cloud?

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 26 free alternatives to Ollama Cloud in AI / ML, each listed above with its tier. Of those, 14 carry no recorded demerit and are indistinguishable under every signal we hold, so they are listed in an order that rotates daily, 5 are demoted with the reason named, 7 are listed last behind a stated gate. Our ranking rule is published at /criteria.

When will I outgrow Ollama Cloud's free tier?

When your usage exceeds the free tier limits, 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 Ollama Cloud in?

Ollama Cloud is categorized under AI / ML on AgentDeals. We list 26 other AI / ML services alongside it, every one of them on this page with its free tier and the stability we publish for it.