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Sail Research free tier

🔌 LLM APIs with free tier · card required · not offered in Russia, Iran, Syria and 2 more places · live — last verified by a probe on 2026-10-26 · sailresearch.com · back to the whole list

What you get

Open-weight models for long-running agents — Kimi K3, GLM-5.3, DeepSeek V4 Pro — behind OpenAI- and Anthropic-compatible APIs, with $5 of free credit every month once a payment method is on the account

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

$5/month per account

Attaching a payment method is required for recurring free credit. Credit spends at per-token prices that depend on the requested completion window. The vendor states “No strict rate limits” and says request and response data is not used to train models without written consent.

Where it is offered

Not offered in Russia, Iran, Syria, Cuba and North Korea (source, read 2026-09-26). That leaves out 2.4% of the developers GitHub counts, beyond the countries under comprehensive US embargo (Innovation Graph, 2026 Q1). In the vendor’s words: “access or use the Services in or for the benefit of any embargoed or sanctioned country, region, or person (including Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Syria, the Crimea, Donetsk, and Luhansk regions, and Russia)”.

What happens to what you send

What you send is not used to train models. In the vendor’s words: “We do not use inference request or response data to train, fine-tune, or improve models without your written consent.” (source).

Connect

Base URL: https://api.sailresearch.com/v1
Key: SAIL_RESEARCH_API_KEY — get one at https://app.sailresearch.com
Callable ids: moonshotai/Kimi-K3, zai-org/GLM-5.3, deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V4-Pro-0813, zai-org/GLM-5.3-Flash, deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V4-Flash-0731
Note: Select an ID from the current models page and confirm availability with authenticated /v1/models. The vendor documents Responses, Chat Completions and Messages APIs. A balanced or flex completion window trades latency for lower token prices; some models are flex-only. The listed examples use the default window.

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

curl -s https://api.sailresearch.com/v1/chat/completions \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $SAIL_RESEARCH_API_KEY" \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{"model":"moonshotai/Kimi-K3","messages":[{"role":"user","content":"2+2? MAKE NO MISTAKES."}]}'

Evidence

Probe: the page at https://www.sailresearch.com/, anchored on $5 in free credits every month when you attach a payment method
Source: https://www.sailresearch.com/
Source: https://docs.sailresearch.com/pricing
Source: https://docs.sailresearch.com/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: dropped deepseek-v4-flash, deepseek-v4-pro, glm-5.3, glm-5.3-flash, kimi-k3
2026-09-21 — Added: Open-weight models for long-running agents — Kimi K3, GLM-5.3, DeepSeek V4 Pro — behind OpenAI- and Anthropic-compatible APIs, with $5 of free credit every month once a payment method is on the account

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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