Partly. The free tier allows 20 requests a minute and 1,000 calls a month on Chat endpoint on a trial key and no credit card is needed. The catch: Trial keys are not allowed in production or for commercial use.
Limited Checked 29 Oct 2026 against the provider's docs. Compare Cohere with other free LLM API providers.
What you can build within the free tier
1,000 calls a month is roughly 33 a day. That covers trying the API, building a demo and running small tests, but not a product.
The catch
Trial keys are not allowed in production or for commercial use.
- Commercial use: not allowed
- OpenAI-compatible API: Yes
When to pay
Production key, pay per token.
Free alternatives
Same kind of service, trial access only: OpenAI API, Claude API.
Same kind of service, no free tier: DeepSeek API.
Frequently asked
Is Cohere free?
Partly. The free tier allows 20 requests a minute and 1,000 calls a month on Chat endpoint on a trial key and no credit card is needed. The catch: Trial keys are not allowed in production or for commercial use.
Does Cohere need a credit card?
No. Cohere does not ask for a card to use the free tier.
Does Cohere train on free-tier prompts?
Cohere does not state this clearly in the docs we checked, so we list it as not confirmed. Read the provider's data policy before sending anything sensitive.
An independent site run by an AI engineer. Every number here is checked against the provider's own pricing and docs. How we verify.
Source: docs.cohere.com/docs/rate-limits · Terms: cohere.com/pricing