NVIDIA NIM
LLM 6.5/10Free OpenAI-compatible API access to a large catalog of hosted open models on NVIDIA's developer platform.
NVIDIA NIM scores 6.5/10 for free value in LLM. The main constraint: Free developer access: sign up and call many models through one endpoint; free use is governed by a 40 requests-per-minute rate limit (NVIDIA retired the old signup-credit system). Verify current rate limits and model list on the site.
Free value score
6.5 / 10Show the math
Key metrics
Models
38 free · 139+ total| Model | Family | AA | Access |
|---|---|---|---|
| minimax-m3 | MiniMax | 44.4 | free |
| deepseek-v4-pro | DeepSeek | 44.3 | free |
| kimi-k2.6 | Kimi | 42.8 | free |
| deepseek-v4-flash | DeepSeek | 40.3 | free |
| glm-5.1 | GLM | 40.2 | free |
| minimax-m2.7 | MiniMax | 38.1 | free |
| nemotron-3-ultra-550b-a55b | Nemotron | 37.8 | free |
| qwen3.5-122b-a10b | Qwen | 32.3 | free |
| qwen3.5-397b-a17b | Qwen | 32 | free |
| mistral-medium-3.5-128b | Mistral | 29.9 | free |
| step-3.7-flash | Step (StepFun) | 29.7 | free |
| gpt-oss-120b | GPT (OpenAI open) | 23.8 | free |
| mistral-small-4-119b-2603 | Mistral | 20.8 | free |
| mistral-large-3-675b-instruct-2512 | Mistral | 16.2 | free |
| gpt-oss-20b | GPT (OpenAI open) | 14.9 | free |
| nemotron-3-nano-omni-30b-a3b-reasoning | Nemotron | 14.9 | free |
| llama-4-maverick-17b-128e-instruct | Llama | 14.3 | free |
| nemotron-3-nano-30b-a3b | Nemotron | 7.4 | free |
| diffusiongemma-26b-a4b-it | Gemma | — | free |
| gemma-2-2b-it | Gemma | — | free |
| gemma-3n-e2b-it | Gemma | — | free |
| gemma-3n-e4b-it | Gemma | — | free |
| gemma-4-31b-it | Gemma | — | free |
| llama-3.1-70b-instruct | Llama | — | free |
| llama-3.1-8b-instruct | Llama | — | free |
| llama-3.1-nemotron-nano-8b-v1 | Nemotron (Llama) | — | free |
| llama-3.2-90b-vision-instruct | Llama | — | free |
| llama-3.3-70b-instruct | Llama | — | free |
| llama-3.3-nemotron-super-49b-v1.5 | Nemotron (Llama) | — | free |
| ministral-14b-instruct-2512 | Mistral | — | free |
| mistral-nemotron | Mistral/Nemotron | — | free |
| mixtral-8x7b-instruct-v0.1 | Mistral | — | free |
| nemotron-3-super-120b-a12b | Nemotron | — | free |
| nvidia-nemotron-nano-9b-v2 | Nemotron | — | free |
| paligemma | Gemma | — | free |
| qwen3-next-80b-a3b-instruct | Qwen | — | free |
| seed-oss-36b-instruct | Seed (ByteDance) | — | free |
| step-3.5-flash | Step (StepFun) | — | free |
| qwen-image | Qwen | — | paid |
| qwen-image-edit | Qwen | — | paid |
Showing first 38 of a larger catalog.
What you get
Large hosted model catalog
OpenAI-compatible: integrate.api.nvidia.com
Free rate-limited access (~40 RPM)
No card required to start
Limitations
- NVIDIA developer account required
Users must register a free NVIDIA developer account; no credit card is needed but identity signup is required.
Sources
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"We no longer use a credit-based system for build.nvidia.com. As you noted, this has been replaced by rate limits for trial usage. The rate limits vary for each model, and we do not publish those."
https://forums.developer.nvidia.com/t/request-more-4-000-credits-option-on-build-nvidia-com/344567 -
"When you create the account and get the API key you are using the NIM as a trial. You don't need to do anything else first. The trial period is not limited by a time period."
https://forums.developer.nvidia.com/t/request-more-4-000-credits-option-on-build-nvidia-com/344567 -
"Current Limit: 40 RPM ... The current limit frequently causes 429 "Too Many Requests" errors"
https://forums.developer.nvidia.com/t/request-for-nvidia-nim-api-rate-limit-increase-40-200-rpm/369357 -
"Moonshotai ... Free Endpoint ... kimi-k2.6 ... 1T multimodal MoE for long-horizon coding, agentic tool use, and image/video understanding. ... DeepSeek AI ... Free Endpoint ... deepseek-v4-pro ... Z.ai ... Free Endpoint ... glm-5.1"
https://build.nvidia.com/models