Lightning AI Model APIs / litAI
$15 in credits refresh on a published schedule.
https://lightning.ai/api/v1Models mentioned
anthropic/claude-fable-5anthropic/claude-haiku-4-5-20251001anthropic/claude-opus-4-5-20251101anthropic/claude-opus-4-6anthropic/claude-opus-4-7anthropic/claude-opus-4-8anthropic/claude-opus-5anthropic/claude-sonnet-4-5-20250929anthropic/claude-sonnet-4-6anthropic/claude-sonnet-5google/gemini-2.5-flashgoogle/gemini-2.5-flash-lite-preview-06-17google/gemini-2.5-progoogle/gemini-3-flash-previewgoogle/gemini-3.1-flash-lite-previewgoogle/gemini-3.1-pro-previewgoogle/gemini-3.5-flashlightning-ai/Qwen3.8-27Blightning-ai/deepseek-v4-prolightning-ai/gemma-4-31B-itopenai/gpt-3.5-turboopenai/gpt-4openai/gpt-4-turboopenai/gpt-4-turbo-previewopenai/gpt-4.1openai/gpt-4oopenai/gpt-5openai/gpt-5-miniopenai/gpt-5-nanoopenai/gpt-5.2-2025-12-11openai/gpt-5.4-2026-03-05openai/gpt-5.4-mini-2026-03-17openai/gpt-5.4-nano-2026-03-17openai/gpt-5.5-2026-04-23openai/gpt-5.6-lunaopenai/gpt-5.6-solopenai/gpt-5.6-terraopenai/gpt-6-astraopenai/o3openai/o3-miniEquivalent paid value
How this was valued: Conservative face value of the separately documented recurring platform balance. The advertised 30M Model API tokens are excluded because public pages do not reconcile them with token-priced litAI calls.
The signed-in billing page is authoritative; do not add the 30M-token claim to the $15 balance without confirming whether they are independent.
Limits and terms
- Advertised Model API Tokens Per Month
- 30,000,000
- Requests Per Minute
- 15
- Tokens Per Minute
- 120,000
- Separate Platform Credits USD Per Month
- 15
- Reset
- Free platform balance is topped up to $15 on the first of each month and does not accumulate.
- Caveat
- Public pages do not fully reconcile the 30M-token promise with token-priced litAI calls and the separate $15 balance; the signed-in billing page is authoritative.
What happens to your prompts?
Model-API retention, training, publisher access, and plan-specific protections are not documented fully.
- Plan Scope
- Lightning AI platform and hosted Model APIs; model publishers and deployed applications can add separate terms.
- Prompt Retention
- No Model-API-specific content retention period was found in the public legal or product documentation.
- Response Retention
- not documented
- Ordinary Logging
- Platform account, use, diagnostic, and security information may be collected; content logging is not clearly separated.
- Model Training
- No plan-specific commitment excluding free Model API inputs and outputs from training was found.
- Product Improvement
- General platform information may be used to operate and improve services; the treatment of inference content is unclear.
- Human Or Operator Access
- Lightning and the publisher/operator of a model endpoint may technically process content; no universal operator-access limitation is published.
- Subprocessors And Routing
- Requests run on Lightning infrastructure and can target third-party-published models or apps, creating a separate publisher trust boundary.
- Deletion Controls
- General account/privacy rights exist, but no per-request content deletion or TTL was found.
- Caveat
- Security and general legal policies do not establish a uniform privacy contract for every community Model API.
Governing documents
- Terms Of Service
- https://lightning.ai/terms-of-service
- Privacy Policy
- https://lightning.ai/privacy-policy
Eligibility
- Account Required
- Yes
- Payment Method Required
- No
- Phone Verification Required
- Yes
- Country Availability Applies
- Yes
- One Free Account Per Person
- Yes
Primary sources
Before you build with Lightning AI Model APIs / litAI
Read the classification narrowly
This record has current first-party evidence for some zero-cost hosted inference. The label describes the bounded offer supported by evidence on 2026-09-19; it does not guarantee permanence, production suitability, uptime, latency, model quality, or access from every region.
Resolve the live model route
This snapshot records 40 model IDs. Match the exact ID against the provider's live catalog before using it in code; zero-price routes and aliases can rotate while an older documentation page remains online. The recorded base endpoint is https://lightning.ai/api/v1, but the provider's current API reference remains authoritative for paths, authentication, and request shape.
Confirm account and billing boundaries
An account is required, so public catalog evidence cannot by itself prove the limits, balance, or billing behavior attached to your workspace. The reviewed evidence explicitly says no payment card is required. Re-check the signup flow because eligibility and billing controls can change after the snapshot. The equivalent paid value shown here prices a documented allowance where possible; it is not cash, guaranteed savings, or protection from overage.
Re-read the prompt policy for your plan
This record classifies the reviewed handling as “Partially private”: Model-API retention, training, publisher access, and plan-specific protections are not documented fully. Provider policies can distinguish free, paid, enterprise, opted-in, and feature-specific traffic, so verify the governing terms for the exact account and route that will receive your data.
Follow the evidence, then re-check it
The record links 11 first-party sources covering the offer, catalog, limits, pricing, terms, privacy, or adoption evidence available to the audit. Prefer the newest governing document or live catalog when sources disagree, and submit a correction when a provider changes a material term.
Match the quota to the workload shape
Translate the published allowance into the traffic pattern you actually expect instead of comparing headline totals alone. A daily token pool can look generous while a low requests-per-minute or concurrency ceiling blocks interactive bursts; a high request limit can still fail a long-context job when input, output, or per-request tokens are capped. Separate prompt tokens from generated tokens, include retries and tool calls, and test the largest realistic payload. If the provider documents more than one limit window, the tightest window at your peak load is the practical ceiling. Research, experimental, and community access can also carry eligibility or fair-use constraints that cannot be modeled as a simple number.
Plan fallback without changing the rules
A fallback should preserve more than API syntax. Confirm that the substitute route supports the required modality, context length, streaming behavior, structured output, tools, and safety controls, then compare its prompt-retention and training terms. An OpenAI-compatible request shape does not make providers operationally or contractually equivalent. Decide which errors may trigger a retry, cap retry storms, and prevent an exhausted free route from silently switching to a billable model. If deterministic output matters, record the model revision and sampling settings; rotating aliases and free-model pools can change behavior even when the endpoint remains available.
Monitor the offer as a dependency
Capture the model ID, response model field, rate-limit headers, usage fields, latency, HTTP status, and any provider request identifier for each test. Watch for authorization failures, quota exhaustion, catalog removal, policy revisions, and dashboard balance changes as separate failure modes. Re-check the provider’s live catalog and governing pages on a schedule proportionate to the workload’s importance, and keep the dated sources that supported your decision. Free capacity is especially suitable for prototypes, evaluations, fallbacks, and bounded workloads when the application can tolerate change; a production dependency still needs observability, an exit path, and an owner responsible for re-verification.
Test one complete request before scaling
Start with the smallest permitted request using the exact credential, model ID, endpoint, and account type you intend to deploy. Record the HTTP status, response headers, usage fields, latency, and any dashboard balance change. Then exercise the failure path: an invalid model, an exhausted quota, or a rate-limit response should fail clearly without silently switching to a paid route. If the provider supports streaming or tool calls, validate those features separately because a free model can expose a narrower capability set than its paid counterpart. Keep a budget ceiling outside the application whenever billing is possible, and avoid sending sensitive data until the observed route matches the reviewed data agreement.