Novita AI free tier

What Novita AI's free tier allows

No model on the pricing table is priced at zero any more. The two entries this catalog previously listed as Free — inclusionai/Ling-3.0-flash and Mind Lab Macaron V1 Venti — are gone from the table. The cheapest rows are now Llama 3.1 8B Instruct at $0.02 input / $0.05 output per million and BAAI:BGE-M3 embeddings at $0.01 per million. No signup credit is published, and the page states no request-rate numbers.

Published limits

Enforced but not published

Free access type

Metered access

Credit card

Not required

Protocol

OpenAI-compatible at https://api.novita.ai/openai

Lifecycle

Active

Sources reviewed

2026-08-22

Moved out of the free-tier list because the free rows disappeared, not because the service did. Batch inference carries an introductory 50% discount.

Where Novita AI sits in this catalog

Novita AI is one of 8 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.

Models Novita AI lists as free

• Llama 3.1 8B Instruct — Llama, also free at 8 other providers here
• OpenAI: GPT OSS 20B — not part of any family this catalog tracks across providers
• BAAI:BGE-M3 — not part of any family this catalog tracks across providers

8 other providers here also host the Llama family on free terms, and the terms are not the same: SambaNova Cloud, Cloudflare Workers AI, Fireworks AI, IBM watsonx.ai, Together AI, Nebius Token Factory, DeepInfra, Scaleway Generative APIs.

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 = "BAAI:BGE-M3"
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 enforced but not published. 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 2026-08-22. Moved out of the free-tier list because the free rows disappeared, not because the service did. Batch inference carries an introductory 50% discount.

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 2026-08-22. 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.