Novita AI free tier: limits and models

What Novita AI's free tier allows

The official pricing table lists inclusionai/Ling-3.0-flash and Mind Lab's Macaron V1 Venti with both input and output priced Free; every other listed model is billed per million tokens. Novita does not publish RPM or RPD for the free models on the pricing page.

Published limits: Selected models priced at zero
Free access type: Provider free tier
Credit card: Not required
Protocol: OpenAI-compatible at https://api.novita.ai/openai
Lifecycle: Active
Sources reviewed: 2026-07-25

Which models are free changes with the catalogue, so re-check the pricing table before depending on a specific free model ID.

Where Novita AI sits in this catalog

Novita AI 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 no fixed request count, as 16 of the 25 do not.

Compared with	Published limits	Card	Endpoint
Novita AI (this page)	Selected models priced at zero	Not required	`api.novita.ai`
Mistral La Plateforme	Enforced but not published	Not required	`api.mistral.ai`
Alibaba Cloud Model Studio	Published per model	Not required	`dashscope-intl.aliyuncs.com`
Moonshot AI (Kimi)	Published per tier	Not required	`api.moonshot.ai`

Models Novita AI lists as free

inclusionai/Ling-3.0-flash — not part of any family this catalog tracks across providers
Mind Lab Macaron V1 Venti — 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 Novita AI is the only route to them here.

Checking a Novita AI 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.novita.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

: "${NOVITA_API_KEY:?Set NOVITA_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 $NOVITA_API_KEY" \
  'https://api.novita.ai/openai/models'

Using a Novita AI key

Novita AI serves the OpenAI chat completions protocol at https://api.novita.ai/openai. Point any client that accepts a custom base URL at it, and let the client read the key from NOVITA_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 = "inclusionai/Ling-3.0-flash"
model_provider = "novita"

[model_providers.novita]
name = "Novita AI OpenAI-compatible gateway"
base_url = "https://api.novita.ai/openai"
env_key = "NOVITA_API_KEY"
wire_api = "responses"

Questions about the Novita AI free tier

Does Novita AI ask for a credit card?

No. Novita AI 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 Novita AI's free-tier rate limits?

Novita AI publishes no single free-tier number: its limits are selected models priced at zero. This catalog leaves that blank rather than guessing a figure.

What happens when a Novita AI 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 Novita AI free tier going away?

Nothing in Novita AI's own documentation says so as of 2026-07-25. Which models are free changes with the catalogue, so re-check the pricing table before depending on a specific free model ID.

Can Novita AI be used with Codex, Cline, or Continue?

Yes. Novita AI serves the OpenAI chat completions protocol at https://api.novita.ai/openai, 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

Novita pricinghttps://novita.ai/pricing
Novita LLM API referencehttps://novita.ai/docs/api-reference/model-apis-llm-create-chat-completion
Novita model libraryhttps://novita.ai/models

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.