I'm trying to kick off a small project that incorporates AI, but I've found most AI APIs out there to be quite pricey for my budget. As this is my first time delving into AI development, I'm eager to experiment but need something more affordable. Ideally, I'm looking for free AI APIs (even with limited usage) or options that are less expensive. Any suggestions?
4 Answers
The smaller or older models from OpenAI and Anthropic can be pretty affordable as well. I managed to process a lot of documents overnight and only ended up with a bill of about 20 cents. If you just set a small budget like $5, you might be surprised at what you can accomplish with the major APIs.
Check out CloudFlare's AI worker! You can sign up and get an API token to access their 60 open-source models, including speech-to-text and text-to-speech. They have a really generous daily quota that resets, so you won’t have to stress about exceeding it, and you can do all of this for free without needing a credit card.
Gemini offers a pretty handy free tier for their services. You could also consider running open-source models on your local machine. For example, using Deepseek-r1 with Ollama is a no-cost way to experiment, though it might depend on your hardware.
Have you checked out Ollama? You can download the models and run them locally, which is a great way to start without the high costs of cloud services. They might not be as powerful as the bigger platforms, but they should meet your needs for initial development just fine.
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