What the gpt-oss family is
OpenAI's open-weight gpt-oss models are hosted by more providers in this catalog than any other family, which makes them the easiest way to run an OpenAI-authored model without an OpenAI account.
Providers offering gpt-oss on free terms
10 of the 25 providers detailed in this catalog list at least one gpt-oss model. Because OpenAI publishes the weights rather than the service, the model id can be identical across all of them while the free allowance is not.
| Provider | Free access | Published limits | Card | Matching models |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| GroqCloud | Provider free tier | 30 requests per minute, 1000 requests per day | Not required | openai/gpt-oss-120b, openai/gpt-oss-20b |
| SambaNova Cloud | Provider free tier | 20 requests per minute, 20 requests per day | Not required | gpt-oss-120b |
| Cloudflare Workers AI | Provider free tier | Published in compute units | Not required | @cf/openai/gpt-oss-120b |
| Hugging Face Inference Providers | Provider free tier | Published as a credit balance | Not required | openai/gpt-oss-120b |
| Fireworks AI | Provider free tier | 10 requests per minute | Not required | accounts/fireworks/models/gpt-oss-120b |
| Ollama Cloud | Provider free tier | Enforced but not published | Not required | gpt-oss:120b-cloud, gpt-oss:20b-cloud |
| Cerebras Inference | Free trial credit | 5 requests per minute | Required | gpt-oss-120b |
| Vercel AI Gateway | Free trial credit | Published as a credit balance | Not required | openai/gpt-oss-120b |
| Together AI | Metered access | Dynamic, no fixed numbers | Not required | openai/gpt-oss-120b |
| Scaleway Generative APIs | Metered access | Enforced but not published | Required | gpt-oss-120b |
How the free terms actually differ
- GroqCloud — Free plan limits are per model and enforced per organization.
- SambaNova Cloud — The Free Tier applies whenever no payment method is linked to the account.
- Cloudflare Workers AI — Both the Workers Free and Workers Paid plans include 10,000 Neurons per day at no charge, resetting daily at 00:00 UTC.
- Hugging Face Inference Providers — Signed-in free users receive $0.10 in monthly Inference Provider credits (Hugging Face notes this is subject to change); PRO users receive $2.00 and Team or Enterprise organizations $2.00 per seat.
- Fireworks AI — An account with no payment method and no credits is limited to 10 requests per minute across the entire account.
- Ollama Cloud — Cloud models run on Ollama's servers while keeping the local CLI workflow, and require only an ollama.com account to start.
- Cerebras Inference — Free Trial limits are 5 RPM and 30K TPM per model, capped at 1M tokens per hour and 1M tokens per day, for gpt-oss-120b, zai-glm-4.7 and gemma-4-31b.
- Vercel AI Gateway — Every Vercel team account receives $5 of AI Gateway credits per month on the free tier, usable only against the Free Tier model subset rather than the full catalogue.
- Together AI — Together applies dynamic per-model rate limits that rise with sustained successful traffic and fall when traffic drops, and states plainly that there are no fixed per-model limits published.
- Scaleway Generative APIs — Every model served through Generative APIs - Serverless is limited by tokens per minute, queries per minute and concurrent requests.
Picking one
4 of these 10 publish a fixed request count; the rest state a tier or a credit balance instead, which means the only honest answer to "how much is free" is the one in their console. 8 take no credit card. 7 answer a cross-origin browser request, so a key for those can be checked from the browser checker with nothing installed.
A model id that matches gpt-oss is not a promise that the free tier includes it. Providers move individual models between paid and free without changing the id, which is why each row links to the provider page carrying that provider's own wording and the date it was read.