Cohere free trial: 1,000 API calls per month on a trial key

Cohere gives every new registration a free rate-limited Trial API key. The official docs put it plainly: “Trial API key usage is free, but limited.” The hard cap is 1,000 API calls per month across the trial key, and there is no dollar credit involved; the grant is metered in calls, not money. The docs do not state a card requirement for trial keys. Checked against the official rate-limits and going-live docs on 2026-09-02.

The trial key limits

Per the rate-limits documentation: Chat is limited to 20 requests per minute, Embed to 2,000 inputs per minute, Rerank to 10 requests per minute, and other endpoints default to 500 requests per minute, all inside the overall 1,000 calls per month. The shape of those numbers matters: the per-minute limits are roomy while the monthly cap is small, so a trial key suits short bursts of evaluation, not a steady trickle of production traffic.

Calls versus credits

Most entries in this catalog measure grants in dollars. Cohere’s is measured in API calls, which makes it immune to the pricing-page ambiguity that plagues dollar grants but also means heavier requests and lighter requests cost the same against the cap. One thousand calls of Embed at up to 2,000 inputs per input-batch minute can process a meaningful corpus; 1,000 Chat calls is an afternoon of testing.

The path to production

Upgrading to a production key requires acknowledging Cohere’s SaaS terms, per the going-live docs. One more gotcha stated there: production keys for newer models can remain trial-limited until a review completes, so a production upgrade does not instantly lift every limit on every model.

Choose or skip

Choose Cohere’s trial key to evaluate embeddings and reranking free, where the per-minute allowances are generous. Skip it as a free production backend; 1,000 calls per month is an evaluation budget by design.

What I have done with it

Not tested yet. This page reports only what the official pages state.

For free access shaped as daily model limits instead of monthly calls, see OpenRouter, or the Mistral free tier for an evaluation mode without published numbers. Every grant I track is on the credits index.