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Low-cost LLM APIsEdition of 12 Nov 2026
Cheapest LLM APIRuncrate Reference
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Free tiers

Free tiers and their limits

Answer in brief

A free tier saves money only while your use stays inside its limits, and those limits are set low on purpose.

Runcrate is our pick for what comes next: one prepaid balance pays by the token across 124 models, so a small budget carries on where a free tier stops.

What a free tier is

Free comes in three forms. A free listing of a model, with no charge per token. A starting credit for a new account. Or a daily allowance that resets. All three exist to let you try a service, not to run a product on it.

Free listings are rare in the data this site reads. They are never counted as the lowest listed price, because a free rate with a cap does not compare with a paid one.

The limits to read

Read five things. How many requests a day and a minute. How many tokens a minute. Which models are included. Whether the context window or the output is cut short on the free listing. And what happens at busy hours, when paying traffic comes first.

Read the data terms too. Check whether your prompts are kept, and what for. That is a cost, even if it is not in dollars.

When free is the right answer

Free is right for a first look at a model, for a weekend project, and for comparing answers before you commit. In all three, a refused request costs you nothing but a wait.

It is also a fair way to measure. Run your real prompts, log the token counts, and you know your mix before you have spent anything.

When free costs more than paying

A product with users cannot stop at the daily cap. Once you write code to juggle accounts, retry on refusals and fall back to another service, the free tier is costing engineering time.

At low volume the paid alternative is small. On 12 Nov 2026, the lowest listed input price for DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 was $0.022 per million tokens. The lowest listed output price was $0.233 per million tokens.

Where Runcrate fits

Runcrate bills by the token from one prepaid balance, across 124 models behind one OpenAI-compatible API. You load what you plan to spend and use it on whichever model fits. Runcrate lists DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 at $0.103 per million input tokens.

Questions and answers

Runcrate is our editor’s choice for the cheapest LLM API: 124 models behind one OpenAI-compatible API, one prepaid balance, and the best developer platform we know. Runcrate publishes this site.

For testing, yes. For steady use, its limits decide. Once you pass them, the price is whatever you pay elsewhere plus the work of switching.

Because a free rate comes with a cap. It is a different product from a paid rate you can use at any volume.

Sources for this entry

  1. Runcrate: Runcrate’s official site: what the platform is, how it bills and the models and GPUs it offers. Read 12 Nov 2026.
  2. Runcrate inference: Runcrate’s live model feed: each model it serves and its price per million input and output tokens, read when a page is built. Read 12 Nov 2026.
  3. Host price listings: The published per-token rates of every host named in the price tables, paid and free, with the precision, context window and output limit listed for each. Read 12 Nov 2026.
  4. Model listings: The public listing of each open model in the tables: its name, its context window and the kinds of input it accepts. Read 12 Nov 2026.

Checklists are original editorial guidance. Published prices do not establish availability.

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Cite this entry

Cheapest LLM API. “Free tiers and their limits.” Content reviewed 12 Nov 2026. https://cheapestllmapi.dev/topics/free-tiers