Pollinations.AI free tier includes Keyless Classic API: one image model and GPT-OSS 20B text, free, no sign-up, rate-limited per IP… Verified October 2026. Compare with 27 alternatives in AI / ML.

AgentDeals › Vendors › Pollinations.AI

Pollinations.AI Free Tier 2026

caution

Why caution: effective 2026-07-10 — Pollinations ended the free Pollen that refilled every hour on every account (0.01 to 0.4 Pollen an hour, by tier). Free Pollen now comes only from Quests, whose rewards are paid once and land as Quest Pollen; further use needs purchased Pollen. The change did not touch the keyless image and text endpoints, which Pollinations documents as the free Classic API. 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180 days and then lapses on its own, with nothing about the vendor having changed; a standing condition — a free tier withdrawn and not restored, a product retired — does not lapse with time.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 2026-07-10, so it lapses on 2027-01-07 unless we record something new first.

Subtypes in AI / ML: image_video_generation — produces images or video from a prompt or a source image; model_gateway — one endpoint that reaches models run by several independent providers; what is sold is the routing, key management and fallback, not the weights. We read that on 2026-09-01 from https://pollinations.ai/, where it says: “Generate images, text, audio and video with state-of-the-art AI models” and from https://github.com/pollinations/pollinations, where it says: “All models, one place: Flux, GPT, Claude, Gemini, Seedream, and more” How we use this.

Limits, pricing history, and 27 alternatives. Verified October 2026. Last updated 2026-10-31.

Pollinations.AI's free tier offers Keyless Classic API: one image model and GPT-OSS 20B text, free, no sign-up, rate-limited per IP… We rate it caution — one recorded limit reduction, on 2026-07-10. Best for ai / ml workloads — 27 alternatives available.

One of 89 AI / ML services we track. See our full AI / ML Free Tier Comparison →
Tier
Free
Category
AI / ML
Pricing Page
https://github.com/pollinations/pollinations/blob/main/enter.pollinations.ai/POLLEN_FAQ.md
Verified
2026-10-31
Last read
2026-10-31
The day we last read the vendor's page, and the day we last confirmed the terms we publish.

Free Tier Details

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. No credit card is required. On 2026-10-11, the nine setup quests paid 3 Pollen in total, worth about $3 because 1 Pollen is worth about $1. The documented API for text, image, audio and video requires a GitHub sign-in and an API key. On the keyed API, free use draws from Quest Pollen, with no promise of future grants. Paid-only models, such as Claude models, DeepSeek V4 Pro and Gemini 4 Argon, need purchased Pollen. Gemini 3.8 Flash (google/gemini-3.8-flash) is paid-only on Pollinations, so Quest Pollen cannot pay for it. Kimi K3 (moonshotai/kimi-k3) is not paid-only. Kimi K3.1 Pro (moonshotai/kimi-k3.1-pro) was paid-only until 2026-11-09, when Pollinations made it Quest-accessible; Quest Pollen can now pay for it. To run Claude Code on free Quest Pollen, run "polli harness claude-code on", start Claude Code with "claude --settings ~/.pollinations/claude-code.json", and use a model that is not paid-only. Quest Pollen pays for any model that Pollinations' live catalog (enter.pollinations.ai/models) does not mark paid-only. On 2026-10-18, more than 30 text models were not paid-only, among them GPT-6 Sol, GPT-6.1 Sol, GPT-6 Luna, GLM 5.3, Kimi K3, DeepSeek V4 Flash and DeepSeek V4.1 Flash. The command "polli harness claude-code on" connects Claude Code to Pollinations and uses openai/gpt-6-sol unless you specify another model. Pollinations' harness documentation says the command writes "a Claude Code settings file" and: "Claude Code reads the file only when launched with --settings; plain claude keeps your native login and ~/.claude settings." (From https://github.com/pollinations/pollinations/blob/main/CODING_HARNESSES.md, read 2026-10-20.) GPT-6 Sol costs 1.5 Pollen per million input tokens and 7.5 Pollen per million output tokens. For requests over 272,000 prompt tokens, GPT-6 Sol costs 3 Pollen per million input tokens and 11.25 Pollen per million output tokens, and these rates apply to the whole request. GPT-5 Nano costs 0.0375 and 0.30. GPT-OSS 20B costs 0.05 and 0.18. NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Lightning costs 0.045 and 0.165. Adding --model <id> to "polli harness claude-code on" picks another model. The documented API is OpenAI-compatible at the base URL https://gen.pollinations.ai/v1, with an API key from https://enter.pollinations.ai/keys. Pollinations' MCP documentation gives this Claude Code command: "claude mcp add --transport http pollinations https://gen.pollinations.ai/mcp/pollinations --header 'Authorization: Bearer YOUR_KEY'". Its tools include generateImage, generateText, generateVideo, generateAudio, listModels and getBalance. "Calls use the same Pollen wallet as the Pollinations API." The "polli harness claude-code on" command runs Claude Code itself on a Pollinations model; the MCP server gives an agent Pollinations tools. Model IDs of some of the models Quest Pollen can pay for: openai/gpt-6-sol, openai/gpt-6.1-sol, openai/gpt-6-luna, z-ai/glm-5.3, moonshotai/kimi-k3, deepseek/deepseek-v4-flash, deepseek/deepseek-v4.1-flash, openai/gpt-5-nano, openai/gpt-oss-20b, nvidia/nemotron-3.5-lightning, moonshotai/kimi-k3.1-pro.

Pollinations.AI runs its own MCP server. "Use Pollinations-hosted MCP servers from any Model Context Protocol client that supports Streamable HTTP." (From https://github.com/pollinations/pollinations/blob/main/gen.pollinations.ai/src/docs/mcp.md, read 2026-10-20.) The endpoint is https://gen.pollinations.ai/mcp/pollinations, the transport is Streamable HTTP, and authentication uses the header "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_KEY" with a key from https://enter.pollinations.ai/keys. npm marks @pollinations/model-context-protocol "Retired. Use the hosted MCP server: https://gen.pollinations.ai/mcp/pollinations" (From https://www.npmjs.com/package/@pollinations/model-context-protocol, read 2026-10-20.) npm marks @pollinations/mcp "Retired. Use the hosted MCP server: https://gen.pollinations.ai/mcp/pollinations" (From https://www.npmjs.com/package/@pollinations/mcp, read 2026-10-20.)

We read that on 2026-10-31 from https://github.com/pollinations/pollinations/blob/main/enter.pollinations.ai/POLLEN_FAQ.md, and our check recorded: the page names Pollinations.AI as "pollinations ai" and states "$1".

When You'll Outgrow Pollinations.AI's Free Tier

Pricing Change History (1 recorded)

reduced effective 2026-07-10 high impact
Pollinations ended the free Pollen that refilled every hour on every account (0.01 to 0.4 Pollen an hour, by tier). Free Pollen now comes only from Quests, whose rewards are paid once and land as Quest Pollen; further use needs purchased Pollen. The change did not touch the keyless image and text endpoints, which Pollinations documents as the free Classic API. Source ↗
Before: "Free Pollen on every account, refilled hourly. No credit card to register." Spore 0.01, Seed 0.15 and Flower 0.4 Pollen an hour (POLLEN_FAQ.md before 2026-06-25)
After: "Removes hourly Pollen drip/refill, user-tier runtime state, tier progression flows, and tier-focused admin/API/frontend surfaces." (pull request 11928, merged 2026-07-10). POLLEN_FAQ.md: "Create an account, complete eligible Quests, and claim the rewards to receive Quest Pollen."

View all 513 pricing changes across all vendors →

Alternatives in AI / ML

How Pollinations.AI 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
Pollinations.AI Free caution
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.
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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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
OpenRouter Free
AI model router. Free plan: 50 requests a day, no BYOK.
 stable
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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.
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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
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
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

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:Pollinations.AI
seed
5f2bab4f9e49814673380776ab631f002ce68964b6a67b838fac91d76753ae98
tie_count
12

Featured in Monthly Reports

July 2026 Report

Watch Pollinations.AI 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=Pollinations.AI curl https://agentdeals.dev/pricing-changes/feed.xml?vendor=Pollinations.AI

API docs →

Related Guides

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

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Pollinations.AI free?
Yes, Pollinations.AI offers a free tier: 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. No credit card ... Pollinations.AI runs its own MCP server. "Use Pollinations-hosted MCP servers from any Model Context Protocol client that supports Streamable HTTP." (From https://github.com/pollinations/pollinations/blob/main/gen.pollinations.ai/src/docs/mcp.md, read 2026-10-20.) The endpoint is https://gen.pollinations.ai/mcp/pollinations, the transport is Streamable HTTP, and authentication uses the header "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_KEY" with a key from https://enter.pollinations.ai/keys. npm marks @pollinations/model-context-protocol "Retired. Use the hosted MCP server: https://gen.pollinations.ai/mcp/pollinations" (From https://www.npmjs.com/package/@pollinations/model-context-protocol, read 2026-10-20.) npm marks @pollinations/mcp "Retired. Use the hosted MCP server: https://gen.pollinations.ai/mcp/pollinations" (From https://www.npmjs.com/package/@pollinations/mcp, read 2026-10-20.)
What is Pollinations.AI's free tier?
Pollinations.AI's free tier is called "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. No credit card is required. On 2026-10-11, the nine setup quests paid 3 Pollen in total, worth about $3 because 1 Pollen is worth about $1. The documented API for text, image, audio and video requires a GitHub sign-in and an API key. On the keyed API, free use draws from Quest Pollen, with no promise of future grants. Paid-only models, such as Claude models, DeepSeek V4 Pro and Gemini 4 Argon, need purchased Pollen. Gemini 3.8 Flash (google/gemini-3.8-flash) is paid-only on Pollinations, so Quest Pollen cannot pay for it. Kimi K3 (moonshotai/kimi-k3) is not paid-only. Kimi K3.1 Pro (moonshotai/kimi-k3.1-pro) was paid-only until 2026-11-09, when Pollinations made it Quest-accessible; Quest Pollen can now pay for it. To run Claude Code on free Quest Pollen, run "polli harness claude-code on", start Claude Code with "claude --settings ~/.pollinations/claude-code.json", and use a model that is not paid-only. Quest Pollen pays for any model that Pollinations' live catalog (enter.pollinations.ai/models) does not mark paid-only. On 2026-10-18, more than 30 text models were not paid-only, among them GPT-6 Sol, GPT-6.1 Sol, GPT-6 Luna, GLM 5.3, Kimi K3, DeepSeek V4 Flash and DeepSeek V4.1 Flash. The command "polli harness claude-code on" connects Claude Code to Pollinations and uses openai/gpt-6-sol unless you specify another model. Pollinations' harness documentation says the command writes "a Claude Code settings file" and: "Claude Code reads the file only when launched with --settings; plain claude keeps your native login and ~/.claude settings." (From https://github.com/pollinations/pollinations/blob/main/CODING_HARNESSES.md, read 2026-10-20.) GPT-6 Sol costs 1.5 Pollen per million input tokens and 7.5 Pollen per million output tokens. For requests over 272,000 prompt tokens, GPT-6 Sol costs 3 Pollen per million input tokens and 11.25 Pollen per million output tokens, and these rates apply to the whole request. GPT-5 Nano costs 0.0375 and 0.30. GPT-OSS 20B costs 0.05 and 0.18. NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Lightning costs 0.045 and 0.165. Adding --model <id> to "polli harness claude-code on" picks another model. The documented API is OpenAI-compatible at the base URL https://gen.pollinations.ai/v1, with an API key from https://enter.pollinations.ai/keys. Pollinations' MCP documentation gives this Claude Code command: "claude mcp add --transport http pollinations https://gen.pollinations.ai/mcp/pollinations --header 'Authorization: Bearer YOUR_KEY'". Its tools include generateImage, generateText, generateVideo, generateAudio, listModels and getBalance. "Calls use the same Pollen wallet as the Pollinations API." The "polli harness claude-code on" command runs Claude Code itself on a Pollinations model; the MCP server gives an agent Pollinations tools. Model IDs of some of the models Quest Pollen can pay for: openai/gpt-6-sol, openai/gpt-6.1-sol, openai/gpt-6-luna, z-ai/glm-5.3, moonshotai/kimi-k3, deepseek/deepseek-v4-flash, deepseek/deepseek-v4.1-flash, openai/gpt-5-nano, openai/gpt-oss-20b, nvidia/nemotron-3.5-lightning, moonshotai/kimi-k3.1-pro. Pollinations' Classic API needs no sign-up and no key. image.pollinations.ai (one image model; JPEGs up to 768 × 768 with a small Pollinations logo) and text.pollinations.ai (GPT-OSS 20B, with an OpenAI-compatible endpoint at text.pollinations.ai/openai) are free and rate-limited per IP address: one image request at a time, at least 45 seconds apart, and one text request at a time, at least 30 seconds apart. Past the limit they return HTTP 402 with a Retry-After header. Pollinations runs it on a best-effort basis with no uptime guarantee, and says limits and models can change. Every other model needs a key from enter.pollinations.ai. (From https://github.com/pollinations/pollinations/blob/master/APIDOCS.md, read 2026-11-06.) Pollinations' API docs publish no fixed request rate for secret keys, which carry their own model permissions and budgets. A request can get HTTP 429 with a Retry-After header saying how long to wait. (From https://github.com/pollinations/pollinations/blob/main/APIDOCS.md, read 2026-10-23.) Pollinations' Terms of Service state that model licences vary and commercial use depends on each model's licence. The Terms set no separate rules for usage paid with free Quest Pollen. There is no SLA. (From https://pollinations.ai/terms, read 2026-10-30.) Pollinations does not use prompts or outputs to train or fine-tune models without explicit opt-in. Prompts and outputs are processed transiently and not retained beyond what is needed to run the service, except saved configuration and short-lived response caches. A request to a community-hosted model is sent to that provider, whose own terms govern storage and training; Pollinations does not verify those practices. (From https://pollinations.ai/privacy, read 2026-10-30.) Pollinations stores generated images, video, audio, and 3D files at media.pollinations.ai. Retrieval is public with the URL. These files have a 30-day lifecycle from upload or refresh. (From https://github.com/pollinations/pollinations/blob/main/APIDOCS.md, read 2026-11-03.) Pollinations requires browser apps to use a user-authorized sk_ key from Pollinations Pay. Personal sk_ keys must not be in browser code. A pk_ key only identifies the app and returns 401 if sent as a key. (From https://github.com/pollinations/pollinations/blob/main/APIDOCS.md, read 2026-11-03.) Pollinations Pay, also called BYOP, lets users authorize an app to spend Pollen from their own wallet. Users set budget, expiry, models, and permissions. They can edit or revoke issued keys. (From https://github.com/pollinations/pollinations/blob/main/enter.pollinations.ai/POLLEN_FAQ.md, read 2026-11-03.) Pollinations' image endpoint has a safe parameter. It defaults to off. The value nsfw enables sexual and violence filtering. The value true enables privacy and secrets filtering. (From https://github.com/pollinations/pollinations/blob/main/APIDOCS.md, read 2026-11-03.) Owners of public community models in Pollinations can set prices. Pollinations credits owners 75% of the Pollen spent on their models. A linked GitHub username is required. (From https://github.com/pollinations/pollinations/blob/main/enter.pollinations.ai/POLLEN_FAQ.md, read 2026-11-03.) Pollinations.AI runs its own MCP server. "Use Pollinations-hosted MCP servers from any Model Context Protocol client that supports Streamable HTTP." (From https://github.com/pollinations/pollinations/blob/main/gen.pollinations.ai/src/docs/mcp.md, read 2026-10-20.) The endpoint is https://gen.pollinations.ai/mcp/pollinations, the transport is Streamable HTTP, and authentication uses the header "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_KEY" with a key from https://enter.pollinations.ai/keys. npm marks @pollinations/model-context-protocol "Retired. Use the hosted MCP server: https://gen.pollinations.ai/mcp/pollinations" (From https://www.npmjs.com/package/@pollinations/model-context-protocol, read 2026-10-20.) npm marks @pollinations/mcp "Retired. Use the hosted MCP server: https://gen.pollinations.ai/mcp/pollinations" (From https://www.npmjs.com/package/@pollinations/mcp, read 2026-10-20.)
Is Pollinations.AI's free tier reliable?
Pollinations.AI's free tier requires caution because of one specific recorded change, on 2026-07-10: Pollinations ended the free Pollen that refilled every hour on every account (0.01 to 0.4 Pollen an hour, by tier). Free Pollen now comes only from Quests, whose rewards are paid once and land as Quest Pollen; further use needs purchased Pollen. The change did not touch the keyless image and text endpoints, which Pollinations documents as the free Classic API. Source: https://github.com/pollinations/pollinations/pull/11928
Is Pollinations.AI's free tier good for production?
Pollinations.AI's free tier is usable for prototyping and development, but we rate it caution because of one recorded limit reduction, on 2026-07-10. Consider alternatives with more stable pricing for critical services.
What changed in Pollinations.AI's pricing?
Pollinations.AI has had 1 recorded pricing change. Most recently: Pollinations ended the free Pollen that refilled every hour on every account (0.01 to 0.4 Pollen an hour, by tier). Free Pollen now comes only from Quests, whose rewards are paid once and land as Quest Pollen; further use needs purchased Pollen. The change did not touch the keyless image and text endpoints, which Pollinations documents as the free Classic API. Source: https://github.com/pollinations/pollinations/pull/11928 (2026-07-10).
What are the best free alternatives to Pollinations.AI?
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 Pollinations.AI 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 Pollinations.AI'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 Pollinations.AI in?
Pollinations.AI 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.