Cohere free tier

What Cohere's free tier allows

Trial keys are free, rate limited and not licensed for production. Chat is limited to 20 requests/minute, Rerank to 10/minute, Audio Transcriptions and EmbedJob to 5/minute, Tokenize to 100/minute, and Embed to 2,000 inputs/minute. Every trial key is additionally capped at 1,000 API calls per month across the account.

Published limits

20 requests per minute

Free access type

Provider free tier

Credit card

Not required

Protocol

OpenAI-compatible at https://api.cohere.ai/compatibility/v1

Lifecycle

Active

Sources reviewed

2026-07-25

Trial keys are explicitly excluded from production use by Cohere's terms; the 1,000 calls/month ceiling is the binding limit.

Where Cohere sits in this catalog

Cohere is one of 15 provider free tier entries among the 25 providers detailed here. It asks for no credit card, which is true of 23 of the 25. It publishes fixed numbers — 20 requests per minute — which only 9 of the 25 do.

Models Cohere lists as free

• command-a-03-2025 — not part of any family this catalog tracks across providers
• command-r-plus — not part of any family this catalog tracks across providers
• embed-v4.0 — not part of any family this catalog tracks across providers
• rerank-v3.5 — not part of any family this catalog tracks across providers

The models above do not fall into any of the multi-provider families this catalog tracks, so Cohere is the only route to them here.

Checking a Cohere 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://api.cohere.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

: "${COHERE_API_KEY:?Set COHERE_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 $COHERE_API_KEY" \
  'https://api.cohere.ai/compatibility/v1/models'

Using a Cohere key

Cohere serves the OpenAI chat completions protocol at https://api.cohere.ai/compatibility/v1. Point any client that accepts a custom base URL at it, and let the client read the key from COHERE_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 = "command-a-03-2025"
model_provider = "cohere"

[model_providers.cohere]
name = "Cohere OpenAI-compatible gateway"
base_url = "https://api.cohere.ai/compatibility/v1"
env_key = "COHERE_API_KEY"
wire_api = "responses"

Questions about the Cohere free tier

Does Cohere ask for a credit card?

No. Cohere 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 Cohere's free-tier rate limits?

Cohere publishes 20 requests per minute. Those are the numbers in its own documentation as reviewed on 2026-07-25.

What happens when a Cohere 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 Cohere free tier going away?

Nothing in Cohere's own documentation says so as of 2026-07-25. Trial keys are explicitly excluded from production use by Cohere's terms; the 1,000 calls/month ceiling is the binding limit.

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

Yes. Cohere serves the OpenAI chat completions protocol at https://api.cohere.ai/compatibility/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

• Cohere API rate limitshttps://docs.cohere.com/docs/rate-limits
• Cohere Compatibility APIhttps://docs.cohere.com/docs/compatibility-api
• Cohere pricinghttps://cohere.com/pricing

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.