Here is the current "Free-Tier AI Stack" for 2026

**1. The Frontier Giants** • **Gemini:** Access **1.5B tokens/day** on Gemini 1.5 Flash/Pro. That is an astronomical amount of context for RAG and long-document analysis. • **OpenAI:** Their “Data Sharing” program offers **250k/2.5M tokens daily**. • **xAI Grok:** Spend just $5 and unlock **$150/month** in free credits. • **Amazon AWS:** New users get **$100 credit for 6 months**, providing access to 200+ models including **Opus 4.7** and **GPT 5.1**. **2. Speed & Open-Source Powerhouses** • **Groq:** The king of inference speed. Access **Llama 3.3-70b** and **Qwen3-32b** at speeds that feel like magic—completely free. • **Mistral:** Their Experimental Program offers a massive **1B free tokens per month**. • **Nvidia:** Use the **Nemotron** suite via their developer playground for high-performance base models. **3. The Aggregators & Community Hubs** • **Hugging Face:** The "GitHub of AI" provides a **Free Serverless Inference API** for thousands of models (Llama, Stable Diffusion, Whisper). No credit card required. • **OpenRouter:** Access **50+ models** with unlimited usage tiers for experimentation. • **Deepinfra:** Get **1M tokens/day** on Llama/Mistral models just for signing up with an email. **4. Specialized & Niche Access** • **Cohere:** Their Trial API gives **1,000 calls/month** for the best-in-class Rerank v3 and multilingual Aya models. • **Lepton AI:** **$10 free credit** on signup to test Llama and Gemma models in a streamlined playground. So, what are building today?