Mar 6 • General discussion
How to add AI to your website without going bankrupt
Everyone thinks of "add AI to your website" and goes straight to paying for Opus 4.6 or GPT-5.2.
Meanwhile others are chilling on free tiers and making money with their websites.
Before we start, there are some technical terms you need to know about:
• RPM: Requests per minute
• RPD: Requests per day
• TPM: Tokens per minute
• TPD: Tokens per day
Here are totally free APIs to make your website AI-powered:
> OpenAI API:
While all GPT models are paid, you can still add speech-to-text capabilities through the whisper-1 model, which gives you 3 RPM and 200 RPD.
> Cohere API:
Cohere has created multiple LLMs with different capabilities: reasoning, translation, vision, or general use.
However, all Cohere models are usable for free through the API with 20 RPM.
> Google AI Studio:
For free, you have access to all Gemini Flash (no Pro 🥺) models at 20 RPD, and Imagen 4 models at 25 RPD (not exactly Nano Banana Pro, but close enough)
> Z.ai API
You have 3 available models: GLM-4.6V-Flash, 4.5-Flash, and 4.7-Flash, all of which are completely free to use.
The best part? It's basically unlimited!
(You can't send more than 1 or 2 Requests at a time though 😅)
> OpenRouter:
There are multiple free models available on OpenRouter. However, there's a 50 RPD limit shared across all free models (not 50 RPD per model)
> Cerebras API:
Create an organisation (it's free), and you get access to GLM-4.7, Qwen 3 235B, and GPT-OSS-120B at very high limits for free.
> Groq API:
You get to access Kimi, Qwen, OpenAI, and Meta models for free, with limits ranging from 200K-500K TPD and 1K-14.4K RPD, depending on model.
> Mistral API:
You get $150 in credits for free to use on any Mistral model
> SambaNova:
You get 20 RPD and 200K TPD per model on your free API for DeepSeek and Meta models
That's all! Feel free to correct me if anything seems wrong. 😊
Good luck with your builds! 🔥
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How to add AI to your website without going bankrupt
