The terms behind the audit.
“Free,” “private,” and even “verified” hide material differences. These are the definitions used across every catalog record.
Free-access classifications
- Always-free quota
- A recurring or indefinite no-cost API allowance measured in requests, tokens, credits, or compute.
- Free model routes
- Named model IDs currently priced at zero inside a provider or router catalog. The available set can rotate.
- Monthly credits
- A dollar-like allowance that refreshes on a published schedule rather than expiring after signup.
- Research / development access
- No-cost hosted inference limited to research, evaluation, prototyping, or other non-production use.
- Experimental access
- An API that is free while a public preview or experiment remains active, without a permanence guarantee.
- Community capacity
- Inference supplied by volunteers, donations, or shared compute, usually without guaranteed availability or throughput.
- User pays
- The developer pays nothing because each end user authenticates and consumes that user’s own provider allowance.
- Trial or promotion
- A one-time credit, fixed window, or limited promotion. It is useful but not a permanent free tier.
Evidence and verification
- Current offer
- A hosted inference offer supported by current first-party evidence. The catalog keeps trials and conditional delivery visibly separate from recurring access.
- Live catalog
- An official models endpoint was queried without credentials. This proves published server metadata, not a successful authenticated generation or zero-dollar bill.
- Live call
- A credential-free inference request succeeded. It still does not prove how authenticated accounts behave or bill.
- Official current
- Current provider pricing, documentation, product pages, or governing terms directly support the recorded claim.
- Dashboard only
- The provider says a limit or catalog exists after sign-in, but the decisive value cannot be checked on the public web.
- Watchlist
- A possible free offer whose model, quota, callability, billing, or eligibility still needs decisive verification.
- Primary source
- Documentation, pricing, terms, catalogs, repositories, or announcements published by the provider or operator itself.
Privacy, pricing, and API terms
- Private prompts
- The reviewed free-tier terms exclude prompts and outputs from model training and avoid retention beyond short-term operations, subject to recorded exceptions.
- Partially private prompts
- Protections exist, but retention, product improvement, human access, routing, or plan-specific conditions prevent a fully private classification.
- Not private prompts
- The reviewed free-tier terms permit training or broader reuse of prompts or outputs, or otherwise make that use explicit.
- Equivalent paid value
- An estimate of what the published free allowance would cost at the same provider’s documented paid rates. It is a comparison, not cash or guaranteed savings.
- BYOK
- Bring your own key. A gateway may be free to operate while the upstream model provider still bills the user’s account.
- Hosted inference API
- A remotely callable interface where the provider runs the model compute. Downloadable weights that require self-hosting do not qualify.
- Model ID
- The exact machine-readable identifier sent to an inference API, such as a catalog slug or provider/model route.
How to use these definitions
Read an offer label as a boundary on the evidence, not as a general endorsement of the provider. “Always-free quota” says the documented allowance recurs or remains available without a fixed trial expiry; it does not promise uptime, latency, production rights, model quality, or access from every account and region. “Current offer” includes finite and conditional access when it is genuinely usable, so pair it with the narrower free-access classification before comparing providers.
Keep privacy and value separate from availability. A zero-price route can still retain or reuse content, and a conservatively private service can still have a small or operationally awkward quota. Equivalent paid value normalizes a measurable allowance using published prices, but it cannot price unbounded community capacity, research access without a transferable commercial rate, or a quota whose decisive unit is missing. “Not quantifiable” preserves that uncertainty instead of treating the offer as worthless or assigning a speculative number.
When terms appear to conflict, prefer the definition attached to the most specific governing source: the exact API product, plan, region, model route, and account type being evaluated. A company privacy policy may not settle developer prompt handling; a marketing page may not override billing documentation; a model catalog may prove an advertised route without proving an authenticated zero-balance request. Follow the provider record’s sources and snapshot date, then use the corrections process when newer first-party evidence changes the classification.