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Venice.ai — free tier setup
Read this first: sustained $0 API access is gated behind staking the VVV token. Venice's free tier covers the chat app; the API requires a spendable balance — official key docs: accounts need "a spendable balance before calling paid endpoints", payable in "DIEM, bundled credits, or USD". The $0 path is staking VVV for Diem — "1 Diem = $1/day of compute" (official pricing page, per catalog). Otherwise you're paying per token (credit card or crypto), or burning the one-time $10 API credit that comes with a Pro upgrade. If you won't hold a crypto token or pay, this provider does not belong in your free cascade.
What you get free
Category: conditional_free. There is no confirmed no-strings API allowance — catalog: "Whether a plain free account gets any API allowance without VVV staking or purchased credits could not be confirmed." The three funding paths: (1) stake VVV → daily Diem compute allowance ("1 Diem = $1/day of compute") that renews every epoch; (2) "Pro subscribers receive a one-time $10 API credit when upgrading to Pro" (catalog/access notes); (3) buy API credits with card or cryptocurrency. Rate limits are generous once funded — catalog raw_text: "Official rate-limit docs (default tier, text models by size class): XS "500 requests/min, 1,000,000 tokens/min"; S "75 requests/min, 750,000 tokens/min"; M "50 requests/min, 750,000 tokens/min"; L "20 requests/min, 500,000 tokens/min"; image 20 RPM; audio 60 RPM; embedding 500 RPM. "1 Diem = $1/day of compute". Free-LLM: "Daily limits for free tier | Basic usage allowed | Limits without Pro | Resets daily"."
Friction check
| Credit card | no (crypto accepted; but some spendable balance — DIEM, credits, or USD — is required for paid endpoints) |
| Phone verification | unknown |
| Org/membership | no account-type gate confirmed; funding gate instead (VVV stake / Pro / credits) |
| Est. time to first key | ~5 min to a key; funding it (VVV staking or credit purchase) can take much longer |
| Trains on your prompts | unknown — Venice markets privacy-first/no-logging; pricing page shows per-model designations ("Anonymized", "Private", "E2EE · Private"), policy text not verified (catalog) |
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.