← All guides · provider record →
Replicate — free tier setup
What you get free
An unquantified grace allowance on select models, no card needed to start — but it converts to billing-required quickly. Per the catalog: "Official billing docs: 'You can run select models on Replicate for free, but after a bit you'll be asked to set up billing.' Official pricing: 'You only pay for what you use on Replicate.' Free-LLM quota table: 'Varies | Small trial credit | Credit-based | One-time trial | 1000+ models (LLMs, image, audio)'." Category: trial_credit. The gotcha: the free amount is never stated anywhere — plan for the billing prompt, not around it. Also note: this is Replicate's native REST predictions API, not an OpenAI-compatible endpoint (OpenAI compatibility is unconfirmed in the catalog).
Friction check
| Credit card | no (to start; billing setup demanded "after a bit") |
| Phone verification | unknown |
| Org/membership | none |
| Est. time to first key | ~3m (default token created at signup) |
| Trains on your prompts | unknown |
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.