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Cohere (trial keys) free tier

🔌 LLM APIs with free tier · no card · not offered in mainland China, Russia, Hong Kong and 5 more places · live — last verified by a probe on 2026-11-01 · cohere.com · back to the whole list

What you get

Cohere’s Command models via free trial API keys that never expire, plus a 30B/3B Apache-2.0 coding model Cohere prices at zero on every key type

Free models

command-a-plus, command-a-reasoning, north-mini-code, command-a, command-a-vision, command-r-plus, command-r, command-r7b

Limits, in the vendor’s words

Trial keys: 1,000 requests/month per key

Trial Chat models: 20 requests/minute per key per model

North Mini Code on production keys: 500 requests/minute per key per model

Trial keys are for evaluation, not production or commercial use; new accounts start with Trial keys. Chat limits differ from those for reranking, embeddings, tokenization and audio. North Mini Code is free on both Trial and production keys until the corresponding rate limit is reached. The trial monthly request allowance applies alongside its per-model rate caps.

Where it is offered

Not offered in mainland China, Russia, Hong Kong, Iran, Belarus, Syria, Macao and North Korea (source, read 2026-09-26). That leaves out 10.4% of the developers GitHub counts, beyond the countries under comprehensive US embargo (Innovation Graph, 2026 Q1). In the vendor’s words: “means Belarus, China (including Hong Kong and Macau), Iran, North Korea, Russia and Syria”.

What happens to what you send

What you send may be used to train or improve models. In the vendor’s words: “Analyzing usage patterns and using Trial or Research User Inputs/Outputs to improve the performance and safety of our AI models.” (source).

Connect

Base URL: https://api.cohere.com/compatibility/v1
Key: COHERE_API_KEY — get one at https://dashboard.cohere.com/api-keys
Callable ids: north-mini-code-1-0, command-a-plus-05-2026, command-a-reasoning-08-2025, command-a-03-2025, command-a-vision-07-2025, command-r-plus-08-2024, command-r-08-2024, command-r7b-12-2024
Note: Use the OpenAI-compatible endpoint; the native API is https://api.cohere.com/v2. The exact IDs come from the vendor’s model pages. north-mini-code-1-0 is free on both Trial and production keys; the other listed models use the Trial allowance.

Try it from your terminal with your key in COHERE_API_KEY — it goes from your machine to the vendor and nowhere else:

curl -s https://api.cohere.com/compatibility/v1/chat/completions \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $COHERE_API_KEY" \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{"model":"north-mini-code-1-0","messages":[{"role":"user","content":"2+2? MAKE NO MISTAKES."}]}'

Evidence

Probe: the page at https://docs.cohere.com/docs/rate-limits, anchored on trial keys, 1,000
Source: https://docs.cohere.com/docs/rate-limits
Source: https://cohere.com/pricing
Source: https://docs.cohere.com/docs/north-mini-code-1.0
Source: https://docs.cohere.com/docs/models

History

Each line is a change to what this page publishes, dated the day it reached the list, in UTC.

2026-09-25 — Free models changed: added command-a-plus, command-a-reasoning, command-a-vision, command-r, command-r-plus, command-r7b
2026-08-14 — Free models changed: added north-mini-code
2026-07-22 — Added: Cohere Command models via free trial API keys that never expire

Generated from registry.yaml on 2026-11-01 and re-verified twice a week; the full list, the Atom feed and the machinery are at https://github.com/mvalentsev/awesome-free-ai-coding.

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