Verify an OpenAI API credit offer in the account that will make requests. Distinguish an available balance from model access and avoid treating promotional credit as an ongoing free plan.

What is free at OpenAI right now

The official billing documentation was checked. No universal ongoing free inference allowance was established by that source. Promotional or account-specific credits require a check in your account. Read the official terms ↗

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A free claim needs current official evidence. If the account has no documented grant, treat the intended workload as paid rather than assuming a new credential creates credit.

Start with the account-level evidence. Identify whether you are checking a promotional grant, an existing prepaid balance or access to a particular API model. These are not interchangeable. A credential’s creation date does not establish a grant, and a successful request does not establish that it was free.

Record the official offer and its scope before planning work around it. If the source does not establish an available grant, prepare a deliberately funded experiment instead of describing the API as free. This is useful even for a small prototype because it makes the continuation decision explicit rather than leaving it to whatever billing state the account happens to have.

Keep the technical evaluation separate from the offer. The evaluation asks whether the application can get an acceptable result. The offer answers who funds the requests and when that funding ends. A temporary grant can support a useful test without becoming a permanent claim about the application’s economics.

Limits of the free tier

Published limits have not yet been verified for this selection. Check the official limits documentation and your account console.

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Request capacity and approved usage are separate controls from your available credit. Official documentation.

Match any documented allowance to the model and project that will make the request. Treat absent quota evidence as unknown, not unlimited. If the account’s current limits differ from a public reference table, use the account view to understand that deployment and preserve the date of the check.

Keep a record of which evaluation examples actually completed. If access pauses partway through, report the result as partial rather than quietly excluding the difficult inputs. A small experiment is valuable when it identifies what remains uncertain. It is less useful when it selects only easy prompts that happen to fit a temporary allowance.

Plan a clean queue pause before connecting background work. Store unfinished task identities in your application and prevent repeated submissions while an account condition remains unresolved. Decide how the queue will resume if more funding is authorized; otherwise a restored account can receive a burst of accumulated work nobody intended to run at once.

What ends the free tier

The error reference identifies depleted prepaid credit and enforced spending limits separately. Official documentation.

Record any offer expiry and decide whether the application should stop when the grant is consumed. Make that decision before connecting background work.

Inspect the grant conditions for expiry, eligibility and what happens afterward. Decide whether the application stops or continues with separately approved paid usage. Write that decision into the experiment’s operating note before scheduling requests. Do not let an unattended process make the decision implicitly.

At completion, save the accepted and rejected results, disable scheduled work and retire the credential if it no longer has a purpose. If the experiment ends early, preserve its unfinished questions. A later funded continuation should target those questions rather than repeat every successful demonstration simply because it is convenient.

When moving to paid usage, create a fresh cost forecast from the measured request shapes and current API rates. Keep the grant out of recurring monthly assumptions unless the official arrangement actually makes it recurring. This prevents a temporary balance from making a long-term budget appear artificially favorable.

How to build within the free tier

Prepare test inputs and evaluation checks before sending requests. Keep the prototype narrow, record returned usage and disable abandoned jobs. Check the billing state after the experiment rather than assuming a successful response means future work remains free.

Prepare a fixture set before calling the API. For structured extraction, include missing values and contradictory evidence. For coding, include a change that must fail a project check. For a support workflow, include a case that should be escalated. Write the expected properties in advance so a fluent response does not redefine success after the fact.

Use synthetic or redacted data during setup, then evaluate the application’s sensitive-data path separately if it needs one. Keep returned usage and accepted task outcomes together. This produces a useful record for deciding whether a smaller model, a narrower prompt or a different request mode would improve the application.

Review failures by category. Missing access, exhausted credit, a request-schema problem and a poor answer need different repairs. Rerun the cases relevant to the repair rather than repeatedly generating more friendly examples. The purpose of the experiment is to reduce uncertainty about a real application, not to accumulate screenshots of successful requests.

Alternatives if you need more

Compare current documented free API options and OpenRouter’s free-model conditions. For a paid continuation, review OpenAI pricing and capacity planning.

Use the AI API cost calculator to turn the model and workload you are considering into an estimate.

Choose a fallback based on the actual unmet requirement. If you need a different modality, inspect a provider that documents it. If a model already performs well, compare a paid continuation with the effort and uncertainty of migration. If the application remains unreliable, narrowing the task may be more useful than obtaining more allowance.

When comparing another API, preserve the fixture set and acceptance criteria. Translate the request deliberately and inspect the response contract. A familiar client library does not establish identical support for every field, hosted tool or output mode. Keep account access and data treatment in the comparison rather than treating the model’s name as the complete product.

End the prototype with a decision: continue, change the design, migrate or stop. Include the evidence behind that decision and the assumptions still unmeasured. An explicit stop can be a successful outcome of an experiment; an indefinitely running prototype with no owner or verified budget is not a useful default.

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Frequently asked questions

Does creating another project guarantee free credit?
No such assumption should be made without an official offer attached to the account.
Can a trial be used as a production cost forecast?
Record the paid fallback separately; a temporary grant does not describe the ongoing workload economics.
Can retries replenish a depleted balance?
No. Billing-related errors require the applicable account condition to be resolved. Official documentation.
How can I pause an experiment?
Stop its scheduled processes and revoke the credential if it is no longer needed.
Where should I check actual availability?
Use the developer dashboard and current account controls linked from the official documentation. Official documentation.

Sources

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