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Merkium free tier

🔌 LLM APIs with free tier · no card · provisional — added on 2026-11-05, a regular row from the first probe it passes on or after 2026-11-19 · live — last verified by a probe on 2026-11-05 · merkium.nl · back to the whole list

What you get

Independent model developer with a free OpenAI-compatible API and chat service; current API models have no per-request or per-token charge

Free models

No free model family is currently listed here; callable ids, where the row has them, are under Connect.

Limits, in the vendor’s words

30 requests/minute per key

Sign in and create a free API key in the Console; no card or billing step. Space requests at least two seconds apart, including each step of a tool-call round trip, and honor Retry-After on HTTP 429. The current models are advertised as permanently free; later models may be paid. The public terms page is a review draft without an effective date.

Where it is offered

The vendor names no country it keeps the offer from (source, read 2026-11-05).

What happens to what you send

What you send is not used to train models. In the vendor’s words: “Your conversations are never used to train, fine-tune or evaluate Merkium models.” (source).

Connect

Base URL: https://chat.merkium.nl/api/v1
Key: MERKIUM_API_KEY — get one at https://chat.merkium.nl
Callable ids: ganymede-1.1, pluto-1.2-flash, pluto-1.2-pro, ceres-1.0, ceres-1.0-pro, pluto-1.1-flash, pluto-1.1-pro
Note: Create a key in the Console API tab. Set the OpenAI-compatible base URL verbatim; use /chat/completions for chat, streaming and tool calls. Model listing also requires the key.

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

curl -s https://chat.merkium.nl/api/v1/chat/completions \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $MERKIUM_API_KEY" \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{"model":"ganymede-1.1","messages":[{"role":"user","content":"2+2? MAKE NO MISTAKES."}]}'

Evidence

Probe: the page at https://www.merkium.nl/docs/pricing, anchored on free to use through the API, permanently, not need a credit card or a billing account
Source: https://www.merkium.nl/docs
Source: https://www.merkium.nl/docs/pricing
Source: https://www.merkium.nl/docs/authentication
Source: https://www.merkium.nl/docs/models
Source: https://www.merkium.nl/docs/rate-limits
Source: https://www.merkium.nl/privacy
Source: https://www.merkium.nl/legal
Source: https://www.merkium.nl/research/ganymede-1-1-technical-report

History

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

2026-11-05 — Added: Independent model developer with a free OpenAI-compatible API and chat service; current API models have no per-request or per-token charge

Generated from registry.yaml on 2026-11-05 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.

Something wrong or missing? Suggest a service or a change — or read how the list works.