Free OpenAI API: every route that works in 2026

Every free route, compared

The table below compares each route to free OpenAI model access: what it gives you, the limit and the catch.

Credits from OpenAI itself

• OpenAI requires a positive account balance before it serves API requests, new accounts that buy credits prepay at least $5 (the default is $10, and purchased credits expire after 1 year), and the billing docs mention no sign-up credit when you set up an OpenAI API key.
• Paid ChatGPT Pro 100, Pro 200 and Pro 500 tiers can claim $100, $200 or $500 of monthly API credits with no API payment method attached, provided the subscription is at least 7 days old; unused credits expire at the end of each billing cycle, and the benefit covers Responses, Chat Completions, Agents, Realtime, Images and built-in tools, but not Codex through API keys.
• ChatGPT Business plans get $20 per paid Business Standard seat and $100 per paid Business Premium seat, pooled across the workspace and capped at $500 a month.
• ChatGPT Plus, Go, Free, free trials, Enterprise and Edu get no API credits.

Free daily tokens for sharing data

• Some organizations can opt in to share API inputs and outputs with OpenAI for daily complimentary tokens; your data sharing settings page shows whether you're eligible, only organization owners can turn it on, and accounts with Zero Data Retention can't use it.
• Eligible Launch ($100+ in total credit purchases) and Grow ($500+) organizations get up to 1M tokens a day on larger models (gpt-6.1-sol, gpt-6-astra, gpt-6-sol, gpt-6-luna, gpt-5.6-sol, gpt-4.1, gpt-4o, o3) and up to 10M a day on smaller models (gpt-5.6-terra, gpt-5.6-luna, gpt-5.4-mini, gpt-5.4-nano, gpt-5-mini, gpt-5-nano, gpt-4.1-mini, gpt-4o-mini, o4-mini), while Build ($5+ in purchases) gets 250K and 2.5M.
• The daily counter resets at 00:00 UTC, and any request that would push your day's total past the quota is billed in full at normal rates.
• Fine-tuned models, fine-tuning training, evals and tool use are excluded, you still need a positive account balance to send requests, and OpenAI gives 30 days notice before ending the program.

Azure's $200 trial credit

An Azure free account gives new Azure customers $200 of credit to spend on Azure services within 30 days, along with free monthly amounts of 20+ popular services for 12 months and 65+ always-free services. Azure OpenAI in Foundry Models is one of those Azure services, while Azure Marketplace offers are excluded from the credit.

Signing up takes a phone number and a credit or debit card, which may get a temporary $1 verification authorization, and Microsoft limits this to one free account per new customer. After 30 days, or once the $200 credit runs out, you have to move to pay-as-you-go pricing to keep running requests.

OpenRouter and GitHub Models

OpenRouter's :free model variants allow 20 requests a minute and 50 requests a day, or 1,000 requests a day once you've bought at least 10 credits (OpenRouter grants the higher cap from 9 credits to absorb rounding and top-up fees, and a negative balance can still trigger errors even on :free ids). On October 29, 2026, only 16 of OpenRouter's 456 models were free, and none of the 16 was an OpenAI model, so GPT models there cost money (see our OpenRouter free models list).

GitHub Models is gone: GitHub fully retired it on July 30, 2026. The playground, model catalog, inference API and bring-your-own-key (BYOK) option are all shut down for every customer.

Use the ChatGPT plan you already pay for

Plan2API's Free plan is $0 with no card required, and it gives you 1 connected subscription, 2 p2a_ API keys and 50 chat requests a day (resetting at 00:00 UTC, at 1 request per second with bursts up to 20 and 4 concurrent requests). The catch: you still need a paid ChatGPT plan with Codex, such as Plus or Pro, because Plan2API connects your ChatGPT subscription as an API through Codex, signing in with a one-time device code.

Once connected, your scripts call https://api.plan2api.com/v1 at POST /v1/chat/completions with an Authorization: Bearer header and model ids prefixed with openai/ or codex/. Requests run against your ChatGPT plan's own usage limits with no per-token billing from Plan2API, though the Free plan doesn't include image endpoints and Plan2API has no /v1/responses, /v1/completions or /v1/embeddings endpoints.

curl https://api.plan2api.com/v1/chat/completions \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $PLAN2API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "model": "openai/gpt-6-luna",
    "messages": [
      {"role": "user", "content": "Give me three names for a cat cafe."}
    ]
  }'

Which free route fits you

• Already on ChatGPT Pro: Claim the $100, $200 or $500 in monthly API credits included with your plan once the subscription is 7 days old.
• Prototyping with non-sensitive traffic on a paid tier: If your organization is eligible, have the org owner opt in to data sharing for up to 250K and 2.5M daily complimentary tokens on Build, or 1M and 10M on Launch and Grow.
• New to Azure and fine with adding a card: Sign up for an Azure free account and use the $200 credit on Azure services, including Azure OpenAI in Foundry Models, within 30 days.
• Already paying for ChatGPT Plus and want a key for your own scripts: Connect your subscription to Plan2API Free for 50 chat requests a day at $0 with no card, or see our guide to free AI APIs beyond OpenAI.