Together AI free credits: None

Together AI gives new accounts no free credits and no free trial. The official docs say it plainly: “Together AI does not currently offer free trials. Access to the Together platform requires a minimum $5 credit purchase.” That $5 is your own money buying prepaid credit, not a grant. The upside in the official wording: purchased credits “do not currently have an expiration date”. Checked against the official pricing and billing docs on 2026-09-02.

The correction

Older posts and aggregator lists still describe Together AI as giving $5 or $25 of free credit at signup. Whatever was true in the past, the official docs as of 2026-09-02 state there are no free trials and that access starts with a minimum $5 purchase. If a list puts Together in a “free credits” column, it is out of date.

Payment mechanics

Together is prepaid and the API suspends at a $0 balance. Auto-recharge requires a credit or debit card; if your default payment method is ACH, auto-recharge is disabled. One account-level gotcha from the official docs: always sign in with the same OAuth provider, because different providers can land you in different accounts.

What to use instead

If the goal was open-weight models through an API at $0, two tracked free tiers serve tokens without a purchase. OpenRouter serves models tagged :free at 20 requests per minute and 50 requests per day, rising to 1,000 per day once lifetime purchases reach $10, with no card required, though OpenRouter itself warns those models are usually not suitable for production. Groq runs a $0 Free plan with rate-limited access to open models; the exact limits are organization-specific and shown in your console rather than published. Neither hands you a dollar balance, but both let you send your first request before spending the $5 Together requires.

What I have done with it

Not tested yet. I have not purchased credit for this entry, so it reports only what the official pages state.

Choose Together if you want its model catalog and are fine prepaying $5. Skip it if you wanted a genuinely free first token: Fireworks AI gives $1 of usable API credit at signup, while DeepInfra sits in the same pay-first camp as Together. For GPU rental rather than APIs, the same correction applies to RunPod.