Ollama Cloud free tier

What Ollama Cloud's free tier allows

Cloud models run on Ollama's servers while keeping the local CLI workflow, and require only an ollama.com account to start. The Cloud documentation page describes access and model retirement policy but does not publish hourly or daily request limits, so the account page is the authoritative source for the active quota.

Published limits

Enforced but not published

Free access type

Provider free tier

Credit card

Not required

Protocol

OpenAI-compatible at https://ollama.com/v1

Lifecycle

Active

Sources reviewed

2026-07-25

Ollama periodically retires older cloud models as newer open-weight models ship; local models are unaffected by those retirements.

Where Ollama Cloud sits in this catalog

Ollama Cloud 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.

Models Ollama Cloud lists as free

• gpt-oss:120b-cloud — gpt-oss, also free at 9 other providers here
• gpt-oss:20b-cloud — gpt-oss, also free at 9 other providers here
• qwen3-coder:480b-cloud — Qwen, also free at 8 other providers here

9 other providers here also host the gpt-oss family on free terms, and the terms are not the same: GroqCloud, SambaNova Cloud, Cloudflare Workers AI, Hugging Face Inference Providers, Fireworks AI, Cerebras Inference, Vercel AI Gateway, Together AI, Scaleway Generative APIs. 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, Together AI, Nebius Token Factory, DeepInfra, Chutes, Scaleway Generative APIs.

Checking a Ollama Cloud key

The endpoint answers the CORS preflight with 405 and no allow-origin header, so a browser refuses to send the Authorization header. That was measured against https://ollama.com on 2026-07-25.

So the browser checker cannot reach it and does not pretend otherwise. Run this instead:

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

: "${OLLAMA_CLOUD_API_KEY:?Set OLLAMA_CLOUD_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 $OLLAMA_CLOUD_API_KEY" \
  'https://ollama.com/v1/models'

Using a Ollama Cloud key

Ollama Cloud serves the OpenAI chat completions protocol at https://ollama.com/v1. Point any client that accepts a custom base URL at it, and let the client read the key from OLLAMA_CLOUD_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 = "gpt-oss:120b-cloud"
model_provider = "ollama-cloud"

[model_providers.ollama-cloud]
name = "Ollama Cloud OpenAI-compatible gateway"
base_url = "https://ollama.com/v1"
env_key = "OLLAMA_CLOUD_API_KEY"
wire_api = "responses"

Questions about the Ollama Cloud free tier

Does Ollama Cloud ask for a credit card?

No. Ollama Cloud 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 Ollama Cloud's free-tier rate limits?

Ollama Cloud 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 Ollama Cloud 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 Ollama Cloud free tier going away?

Nothing in Ollama Cloud's own documentation says so as of 2026-07-25. Ollama periodically retires older cloud models as newer open-weight models ship; local models are unaffected by those retirements.

Can Ollama Cloud be used with Codex, Cline, or Continue?

Yes. Ollama Cloud serves the OpenAI chat completions protocol at https://ollama.com/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

• Ollama Cloud documentationhttps://docs.ollama.com/cloud
• Ollama Cloud API accesshttps://docs.ollama.com/api
• Ollama model libraryhttps://ollama.com/library

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.