Yes. The free tier allows 20 requests a minute and 50 a day on any :free model and no credit card is needed. The catch: 50 requests a day unless you have bought $10 of credits (then 1,000 a day).
Free Checked 29 Oct 2026 against the provider's docs. See the other LLM APIs that are still free.
What you can build within the free tier
50 requests a day is enough to try the API and run a few tests, not to serve users or run anything scheduled.
The catch
50 requests a day unless you have bought $10 of credits (then 1,000 a day).
- Commercial use: Not confirmed
- OpenAI-compatible API: Yes
When to pay
A one-time $10 credit purchase lifts the free cap to 1,000 a day.
Free alternatives
Same kind of service, no free tier: Hugging Face Inference Providers, GitHub Models.
Frequently asked
Is OpenRouter free?
Yes. The free tier allows 20 requests a minute and 50 a day on any :free model and no credit card is needed. The catch: 50 requests a day unless you have bought $10 of credits (then 1,000 a day).
Does OpenRouter need a credit card?
No. OpenRouter does not ask for a card to use the free tier.
Does OpenRouter train on free-tier prompts?
OpenRouter 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: openrouter.ai/docs/api/reference/limits · Terms: openrouter.ai/docs/guides/privacy/provider-logging