Free Llama API in 2026: Where Llama Is Still Free

Free Llama API access in 2026 is thinner than the search results suggest. Meta's own developer site no longer lists Llama models in its API, and the hosts that used to give Llama away for free have moved on to other models. What is left is a short list of hosts that still serve Llama 3.3 70B at no cost or from a free credit, plus running Llama on your own machine. Meta statements below were read on 2026-11-05; limits for hosts come from the catalog rows linked beside them, which are checked monthly.

Meta's own API #

Meta's developer site at dev.meta.ai now describes the "Meta Model API", with "direct, self-serve and affordable access to Muse models". The models listed on its landing page are Muse Wonder, Muse Spark 1.3, 1.2 and 1.1, Muse Spark Open, Muse Glimmer, Muse Image, Muse Voice Transcribe and SAM 3.1, and none is labelled Llama. The page links to Llama Docs and the Llama GitHub, mentions no free tier or free preview, and gives no price beyond the word "affordable" and no rate limits. So as of today there is no free Meta-hosted Llama API we can point you to. If you saw one in an older tutorial, it has moved or ended.

Where Llama is free or free to start #

That is the whole list of catalog offers that serve a Llama model for free, so this guide has three entries, not ten. The catalog row for Groq lists GPT-OSS and Qwen models on its free plan today, not Llama, and the OpenRouter free models guide records that no Llama model had a `:free` variant on its check day. For hosted models in general, compare every free LLM API.

The Llama model in the catalog is Llama 3.3 70B (model page). We have no free offer for Llama 4 models in the catalog today. If you need a newer Llama, you will pay a host per token, or run the weights yourself.

Cloudflare Workers AI in practice #

Cloudflare is the most dependable of the three because the allowance is per account, per day, and needs no card beyond a Cloudflare sign-up. The catalog notes that text generation is limited to 300 requests per minute and that every call counts against the 10,000 free Neurons a day. The same allowance covers Qwen3, GLM-4.7-Flash, gpt-oss-120b, Gemma, Mistral and BGE embeddings, so it is a good place to compare Llama with its neighbours using one key. Because the budget is daily, plan batch jobs in small chunks and cache answers.

AkashML in practice #

AkashML gives new accounts $100 in token credits that work in its playground and its OpenAI-compatible API on every supported open model, with no payment method needed to sign up. That is a lot of Llama 3.3 70B calls for a prototype, but it is a balance: once it is spent, usage is paid. The catalog records no per-model rate limits for Llama there, so build in retries.

Running Llama yourself #

If you need Llama at no cost and without a quota, run it locally. Llama weights are released by Meta under its community licence; read that licence before you build a product on it, because it has conditions that Apache 2.0 does not. Local tools such as Ollama run quantised Llama models on a laptop or a gaming GPU; our guide to running AI locally for free covers the hardware and the tools. For a 70B model you need a lot of memory; most people run a smaller Llama locally and use a hosted 70B for the hard questions. For free GPU time to run a model of your own, see free GPU for AI and the Hugging Face inference guide.

If a Llama model is not free where you need it #

Llama is no longer the default free open model. Hosts that give models away now mostly pick newer families, so when a free Llama is missing, the practical move is to swap the model, not hunt for the host. The nearest open-weight replacements with real free offers in the catalog are covered in the free Qwen, GLM and Kimi API guide (Qwen3.8-27B on Groq, OVHcloud and IteraCompute), the free DeepSeek API guide and the Mistral guide. Because most hosts speak the OpenAI API format, the change is usually one line: the base URL, the key and the model ID.

How to check a free Llama claim yourself #

Tutorials go stale faster than vendor pages. Before you rely on a free Llama route, open the provider's model list while signed in, find the Llama model, and look for three things: whether the price shown is zero or a credit, what the request and token limits are, and whether the page names a date. If any of the three is missing, treat the route as unconfirmed. Our track free-tier changes guide explains how to follow changes so a quota you built on does not disappear without notice.

Which one to pick #

• A Llama 3.3 70B key that costs nothing and needs no card: Cloudflare Workers AI.
• A big budget for a one-off project: AkashML's $100 in credits.
• No account, no quota, nothing sent to a vendor: run Llama locally.
• Llama 4 or newer: pay a host per token; no free offer in the catalog.

Steps #

1. For Cloudflare, create an account, open Workers AI and create an API token with Workers AI permission. Call the REST endpoint for `@cf/meta/llama-3.3-70b-instruct-fp8-fast` or bind it from a Worker.
2. For AkashML, sign up, copy the key from the console and point an OpenAI SDK at its base URL with the Llama 3.3 70B model ID from its model list.
3. For local use, install Ollama and pull a Llama model sized for your memory.
4. Keep the model ID in configuration, not in code, because hosts rename and retire models.

Limits and the catch #

• Few free routes. Three catalog offers serve Llama; the free lineups of other hosts rotate, and Llama is not on the free lists of Groq and OpenRouter on their check days.
• Neurons are not tokens. Cloudflare's 10,000 daily Neurons are consumed according to the model and the size of the call, so a 70B model reaches the cap sooner than a small one.
• Credits end. AkashML and Ollama Cloud allowances run out or reset; neither is an unlimited model.
• The licence travels with the weights. Check Meta's licence before commercial use of a self-hosted model.
• More guides: free Groq API key, free AI API without a credit card, free Qwen, GLM and Kimi API, free DeepSeek API.