Seventeen genuinely free AI offers: Mercury's 100M tokens and OpenRouter's 1,000 requests/day lead the APIs; Lightning, Kaggle and Colab lead free GPUs

Asked (summary):

Which AI companies offer a significant free tier or a big trial — like OpenRouter's 1k requests/day, free big instances on Colab, Kaggle or Lightning AI, Google AI Studio's Gemini quota, or Inception Labs / Mercury's 100M free tokens?

A curated shortlist as of 24 September 2026: 17 current offers from 17 independent official-site sources — 12 model API/inference free tiers or trials and 5 hosted-notebook/cloud-compute offers. It is a researched shortlist, not every AI provider in existence; Google AI Studio/Gemini was investigated, but no reliable current free-quota row was found, so the user's 500-requests/day figure is not repeated as verified.

highlighted headline offers condition to note hard restriction hover an offer for models, conditions and source

Inception Labs grants 100 million free Mercury 2 tokens with every new API key — no card or purchase required. inceptionlabs.ai
OpenRouter's free-model limit jumps from 50 to 1,000 requests/day once you have bought at least $10 of credits. openrouter.ai
Google Cloud's $300/90-day trial cannot attach GPUs to VMs until you upgrade to a paid account — a critical catch for AI work. docs.cloud.google.com
Lightning AI's ~80 interruptible GPU hours need a card: only 5 of the 30 credits arrive before you add one, and credits expire in 12 months. lightning.ai

All 17 offers, side by side

Provider	Type	Free offer	Included	Key conditions	Source

Curated shortlist of 17 free AI offers (12 model API/inference, 5 hosted notebook/cloud compute), one row per provider, each backed by a distinct official source page, researched as of 2026-09-24. Numbers are quoted as published — tokens, requests, Neurons, GPU hours and dollars are not comparable and are never plotted on one axis. Google AI Studio/Gemini was investigated but yielded no reliable row and is excluded. Long condition texts are abridged in the matrix; full text is in the table.

This report was generated automatically by Keenable SELECT at a user's request, from publicly available web sources linked herein. Keenable does not review, verify, or endorse its contents and makes no representation as to accuracy, completeness, or timeliness; AI-based extraction may contain errors. Nothing in this report is investment, legal, financial, or other professional advice. All trademarks and referenced content remain the property of their respective owners; no affiliation or endorsement is implied. To report an error, rights concern, or request removal: legal@keenable.ai.