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NVIDIA NIM (build.nvidia.com) — free tier setup
What you get free
Permanent free access to 100+ hosted models (including Llama 3.1 405B and DeepSeek-R1) behind one OpenAI-compatible endpoint, rate-limited by requests rather than tokens. Per the catalog: "40 requests/minute (cheahjs); 'Rate-limited (no daily token cap)' (mnfst); '~40 RPM' per model." The gotcha: this is the highest-friction signup of the free tier set — NVIDIA Developer Program membership plus phone verification — and there is no official public rate-limit page, so the 40 RPM figure is repo-sourced, not NVIDIA-published.
Friction check
| Credit card | no |
| Phone verification | yes |
| Org/membership | yes — NVIDIA Developer Program |
| Est. time to first key | ~15m (5 steps) |
| Trains on your prompts | unknown — a third-party source states prompts to one free-trial model are logged by NVIDIA; NVIDIA's own policy for build.nvidia.com not verified |
The rest of this guide — the key-obtain walkthrough, first request, the limits that will bite you, and the rotation runbook — ships with the Indie field library. What you’ve read above is the real first section, not a blurred preview; the remainder simply isn’t in this page.