Pollinations.AI free tier

What Pollinations.AI's free tier allows

Pollinations exposes an OpenAI-compatible text endpoint that can be called without a key for basic use, and the official API docs do not publish RPM or RPD figures. The docs do state that since 2025-03-31 free-tier images may include watermarks, so free-tier output is not identical to paid output.

Published limits

Enforced but not published

Free access type

Provider free tier

Credit card

Not required

Protocol

OpenAI-compatible at https://text.pollinations.ai/openai

Lifecycle

Active

Sources reviewed

2026-07-25

This is a community-operated service rather than a commercial provider; treat availability as best-effort and do not build production dependencies on it.

Where Pollinations.AI sits in this catalog

Pollinations.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.

Models Pollinations.AI lists as free

• openai — not part of any family this catalog tracks across providers
• mistral — Mistral, also free at 3 other providers here
• Community-hosted open models — not part of any family this catalog tracks across providers

3 other providers here also host the Mistral family on free terms, and the terms are not the same: Mistral La Plateforme, IBM watsonx.ai, Chutes.

Checking a Pollinations.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://text.pollinations.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

: "${POLLINATIONS_API_KEY:?Set POLLINATIONS_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 $POLLINATIONS_API_KEY" \
  'https://text.pollinations.ai/openai/models'

Using a Pollinations.AI key

Pollinations.AI serves the OpenAI chat completions protocol at https://text.pollinations.ai/openai. Point any client that accepts a custom base URL at it, and let the client read the key from POLLINATIONS_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 = "openai"
model_provider = "pollinations"

[model_providers.pollinations]
name = "Pollinations.AI OpenAI-compatible gateway"
base_url = "https://text.pollinations.ai/openai"
env_key = "POLLINATIONS_API_KEY"
wire_api = "responses"

Questions about the Pollinations.AI free tier

Does Pollinations.AI ask for a credit card?

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

Pollinations.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 Pollinations.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 Pollinations.AI free tier going away?

Nothing in Pollinations.AI's own documentation says so as of 2026-07-25. This is a community-operated service rather than a commercial provider; treat availability as best-effort and do not build production dependencies on it.

Can Pollinations.AI be used with Codex, Cline, or Continue?

Yes. Pollinations.AI serves the OpenAI chat completions protocol at https://text.pollinations.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

• Pollinations API documentationhttps://github.com/pollinations/pollinations/blob/master/APIDOCS.md
• Pollinations project repositoryhttps://github.com/pollinations/pollinations
• Pollinations.AI homehttps://pollinations.ai/

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.