Chutes free tier: limits and models

What Chutes's free tier allows

Chutes prices inference per token and sells subscription plans that bundle a daily quota: Plus at $10/month with a bundled daily quota and 6% off pay-as-you-go rates beyond it, and Pro at $20/month with a larger daily quota and 10% off. The pricing page documents no zero-cost tier, and per-plan request-rate numbers are shown on the plan limits page rather than in pricing.

Published limits: Published per paid plan
Free access type: Metered access
Credit card: Not required
Protocol: OpenAI-compatible at https://llm.chutes.ai/v1
Lifecycle: Active
Sources reviewed: 2026-07-25

Models are served in TEE (trusted execution environment) variants, which is the differentiator rather than price.

Where Chutes sits in this catalog

Chutes is one of 6 metered access entries among the 25 providers detailed here. It asks for no credit card, which is true of 23 of the 25. It publishes no fixed request count, as 16 of the 25 do not.

Compared with	Published limits	Card	Endpoint
Chutes (this page)	Published per paid plan	Not required	`llm.chutes.ai`
Scaleway Generative APIs	Enforced but not published	Required	`api.scaleway.ai`
Together AI	Dynamic, no fixed numbers	Not required	`api.together.xyz`
Nebius Token Factory	60 requests per minute	Not required	`api.tokenfactory.nebius.com`

Models Chutes lists as free

zai-org/GLM-5 — GLM, also free at 3 other providers here
Qwen/Qwen3-32B — Qwen, also free at 8 other providers here
unsloth/Mistral-Nemo-Instruct-2407 — Mistral, also free at 3 other providers here

8 other providers here also host the Qwen family on free terms, and the terms are not the same: Cloudflare Workers AI, SiliconFlow, Alibaba Cloud Model Studio, Ollama Cloud, Together AI, Nebius Token Factory, DeepInfra, Scaleway Generative APIs. 3 other providers here also host the Mistral family on free terms, and the terms are not the same: Mistral La Plateforme, Pollinations.AI, IBM watsonx.ai. 3 other providers here also host the GLM family on free terms, and the terms are not the same: SiliconFlow, Z.AI Open Platform, Cerebras Inference.

Checking a Chutes key

The CORS preflight allows any origin to send an Authorization header, so a browser can call this endpoint directly. That was measured against https://llm.chutes.ai on 2026-07-25.

So a key can be checked in the browser checker without installing anything. If you would rather not paste a key into a web page, this does the same thing:

#!/usr/bin/env sh
set -eu

: "${CHUTES_API_KEY:?Set CHUTES_API_KEY to a key you created yourself at the provider console}"

# Prints the models this key can reach, then the HTTP status on its own line so
# 200, 401, and 429 stay distinguishable.
curl --silent --show-error \
  --write-out '\nHTTP %{http_code}\n' \
  --header "Authorization: Bearer $CHUTES_API_KEY" \
  'https://llm.chutes.ai/v1/models'

Using a Chutes key

Chutes serves the OpenAI chat completions protocol at https://llm.chutes.ai/v1. Point any client that accepts a custom base URL at it, and let the client read the key from CHUTES_API_KEY so the value never lands in a config file:

# Merge this snippet into ~/.codex/config.toml.
# Project-level config cannot select a custom model provider.
model = "zai-org/GLM-5"
model_provider = "chutes"

[model_providers.chutes]
name = "Chutes OpenAI-compatible gateway"
base_url = "https://llm.chutes.ai/v1"
env_key = "CHUTES_API_KEY"
wire_api = "responses"

Questions about the Chutes free tier

Does Chutes ask for a credit card?

No. Chutes is one of 23 providers here that hand out free access without a card, so the only cost of trying it is the signup.

What are Chutes's free-tier rate limits?

Chutes publishes no single free-tier number: its limits are published per paid plan. This catalog leaves that blank rather than guessing a figure.

What happens when a Chutes key hits the limit?

The endpoint answers 429. That is a statement about the request that was refused, not about how much quota is left; only a reset header from the provider tells you when it clears.

Is the Chutes free tier going away?

Nothing in Chutes's own documentation says so as of 2026-07-25. Models are served in TEE (trusted execution environment) variants, which is the differentiator rather than price.

Can Chutes be used with Codex, Cline, or Continue?

Yes. Chutes serves the OpenAI chat completions protocol at https://llm.chutes.ai/v1, so any client that accepts a custom base URL can use it. Claude Code is the exception, because it speaks the Anthropic protocol instead.

Official sources

Chutes pricinghttps://chutes.ai/pricing
Chutes documentationhttps://chutes.ai/docs
Chutes apphttps://chutes.ai/app

Every figure above was read from those pages on 2026-07-25. Where a provider states a limit only inside a console, this catalog records that fact instead of a number. See the methodology for how an entry gets in and how it gets corrected.