OpenAI free credits: None

OpenAI publishes no free API signup credit. As of 2026-08-21, no official OpenAI page states a dollar grant for new API accounts. The “$5 free credit” that circulates in tutorials and listicles is not on the official pages I checked; the way to use the API is to add prepaid credits, and the spend-limits guide describes adding credits when your credit balance is exhausted. This entry exists to correct the record, not to describe a grant.

Where the $5 myth comes from

Two real things on OpenAI’s official pages get garbled into “free $5.” First, the usage-tier table lists Tier 1 as “$5 paid.” That is a qualification threshold, money you pay to enter Tier 1, not money OpenAI gives you. Second, older accounts historically received a trial credit, and that memory keeps getting reprinted as current fact. If a page tells you today’s signup includes $5 free, ask it for an official URL; on 2026-08-21 there is none.

The Free tier is a cap, not a credit

OpenAI’s usage-tier table does include a tier named Free. Read it carefully: it is geography-gated and comes with a $100 per month usage limit. That is a ceiling on how much usage the tier permits, not $100 of free money. Confusing a spend cap with a credit is the exact error this site exists to catch, and the tier’s name makes the error easy to make.

A verification note

help.openai.com and openai.com/api/pricing returned 403 during checking, so verification went through the developers.openai.com documentation, which is official. The negative finding stands on those pages: no free signup credit is stated.

Choose or skip

Choose OpenAI’s API knowing you will prepay from the first token. If you want to try models without paying, skip to providers with a real free path: OpenRouter has free-tier models with published daily limits, and Mistral has a Free mode for evaluation.

What I have done with it

Not tested yet, and there is nothing free to test. This page reports the absence of a grant as of the check date.

The same correction applies to Anthropic free credits, where a circulated $5 figure also fails verification. Every grant I track, including the no-credit corrections, is on the credits index.