Free OpenAI API key: is there one?
OpenAI bills its API per token and we found no permanent free tier on its pricing pages. The ChatGPT app has a free plan, but that is not an API key.
Checked October 2026. Limits are set by each company and change often.
Free ways to reach OpenAI models
- Vercel AI Gateway: $5 of free credit every 30 days, usable on the whole catalog, as long as you never buy gateway credit. It includes GPT models.
- GPT-OSS 120B is OpenAI's open-weight model, and Groq and SambaNova serve it free within their limits (Cerebras has a free trial).
- OpenRouter: Models ending in :free get 20 requests a minute and 50 a day. Buy $10 of credit once and it rises to 1,000 a day for good.
Then use it with every other AI at once
Paste the key into MultiScreenAI next to any others you have. One message goes to every model on one screen, and test mode times them and hides the names. A few free keys together go a long way.
Questions
Is there a free OpenAI API key?
OpenAI bills its API per token and we found no permanent free tier on its pricing pages. The ChatGPT app has a free plan, but that is not an API key.
How can I try OpenAI models through an API for free?
Vercel AI Gateway: $5 of free credit every 30 days, usable on the whole catalog, as long as you never buy gateway credit. It includes GPT models. GPT-OSS 120B is OpenAI's open-weight model, and Groq and SambaNova serve it free within their limits (Cerebras has a free trial). OpenRouter: Models ending in :free get 20 requests a minute and 50 a day. Buy $10 of credit once and it rises to 1,000 a day for good.
Other free API keys
- Gemini
- Groq
- OpenRouter
- Vercel AI Gateway
- Mistral
- Cerebras
- NVIDIA NIM
- SambaNova
- SiliconFlow
- GLM (Z.ai)
- Cohere
- Hugging Face
- Fireworks
- Qwen
- Cloudflare Workers AI
- Pollinations
- Claude (Anthropic)
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