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ModelScope API-Inference (Alibaba) free tier

🔌 LLM APIs with free tier · no card · offered only in mainland China · live — last verified by a probe on 2026-10-26 · modelscope.cn · back to the whole list

What you get

Alibaba model community with a free daily API inference allowance measured in credits, after Alibaba Cloud real-name verification

Free models

The free offer is a budget for model usage across the catalog. See Limits for its conditions and Connect for API details, where available.

Limits, in the vendor’s words

Magicube daily login: 200 credits/day per account (Valid for the day)

Daily bound-account bonus: 50 credits/day per account (Alibaba Cloud account bound; valid for the day)

Additional community rewards: Credits allowance: amount varies (period not published) per account

API inference requires a bound Alibaba Cloud account with real-name verification; spending Magicube also requires a verified personal email. Calls cost 0.5, 1 or 2 credits by model class, so credits are not a fixed request count. Community rewards are separate and variable. Concurrency follows platform load. This is non-commercial, unsuitable for production requiring high concurrency or SLA; older models can be replaced.

Where it is offered

Offered only in mainland China (source, read 2026-09-26). That leaves out 93.6% of the developers GitHub counts, beyond the countries under comprehensive US embargo (Innovation Graph, 2026 Q1). In the vendor’s words: “输入个人认证的姓名和身份证号码”.

Connect

• Base URL: https://api-inference.modelscope.cn/v1
• Key: MODELSCOPE_API_KEY — get one at https://modelscope.cn/my/myaccesstoken
• Anthropic-format base (Claude Code’s ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL): https://api-inference.modelscope.cn
• Callable ids: deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash, deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V4-Pro, ZhipuAI/GLM-5.2, MiniMax/MiniMax-M3, Qwen/Qwen3.8-27B, Qwen/Qwen3.8-Flash-Next, stepfun-ai/Step-3.7-Flash, Qwen/Qwen3.5-397B-A17B, nex-agi/Nex-N2.5-Pro, deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V4-Flash-0731, ZhipuAI/GLM-4.7-Flash
• Note: the key is a ModelScope access token, and it calls only once the account is bound to an Alibaba Cloud account that has passed real-name verification. The ids are the coding-capable rows of the keyless catalog; the Anthropic-format route is in beta

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

curl -s https://api-inference.modelscope.cn/v1/chat/completions \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $MODELSCOPE_API_KEY" \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{"model":"deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash","messages":[{"role":"user","content":"2+2? MAKE NO MISTAKES."}]}'

Evidence

• Probe: the page the index at https://www.modelscope.cn/api/v1/document/main_doc_CN_prod names in Data.TargetPrefix, followed by /dist/model-service/API-Inference/limits/limits_CN.md, anchored on 轻量模型（0.5 魔粒/次）, 旗舰模型（2 魔粒/次）; ids checked in https://api-inference.modelscope.cn/v1/models
• Source: https://modelscope.cn/docs/model-service/API-Inference/limits
• Source: https://modelscope.cn/docs/magicube/intro
• Source: https://modelscope.cn/docs/model-service/API-Inference/intro
• Source: https://api-inference.modelscope.cn/v1/models

History

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

• 2026-09-19 — Added: Alibaba’s model community serves 35 models free — DeepSeek V4 Pro, GLM-5.2, MiniMax M3 and Qwen3.8 among them — for 250 魔粒 a day at 0.5 to 2 a call, after Alibaba Cloud real-name verification

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Generated from registry.yaml on 2026-10-28 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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