Best offer on record: Free public Nominatim API (the only offer; there is no student/startup tier, trial credit, or education program). 3 verified findings, checked 2026-10-22.
Offers
Free public Nominatim API (the only offer; there is no student/startup tier, trial credit, or education program) high confidence
Nominatim offers exactly one access mode: the free public service at nominatim.openstreetmap.org, run by the OSMF Operations Working Group on donated servers. No API keys, no signup, no billing. Limits (verified on the official policy page today): absolute maximum 1 request/second per application/website (sum of all your end users, not per user); long-running (>1 day) or recurring bulk scripts throttled to 4 requests/minute; bulk jobs single-machine single-thread, no distributed scripts; no auto-complete; no systematic queries (grids, full postcode/POI lists); no scraping of /details; no reselling of geocoding output (services whose primary function is geocoding — package/vehicle tracking, API resellers — must host their own instance); LLMs may only point to the service if they prominently surface the policy, and no-code/low-code/vibe-coding platforms are barred from wiring it in as a generic geocoding feature. You must send a valid identifying User-Agent or Referer (library defaults banned) and display OSM attribution. Data is ODbL (share-alike).
Eligibility
Universal: any individual, student, researcher, or startup anywhere in the world. No .edu email, no startup age or funding cap, no credit card, no region limits — you simply call the API. The constraint is use-pattern, not user type: heavy/bulk use is prohibited regardless of who you are.
No expiry or renewal: it is a permanent free public service (still live as of 2026-10-22; Nominatim 5.2.0 shipped 2025-10-29). No sunset date is published, but OSMF explicitly reserves the right to change policy or block clients without notice, so treat the free tier as revocable fair-use capacity, not an SLA.
Gotchas
This is the classic 'free but not for production scale' offer: the public instance is deliberately kept small, and exceeding it means 403/IP blocks, not bills. Bulk geocoding, high-volume API serving, or embedding into a commercial geocoding product are forbidden — for those you must self-host or pay a commercial provider (MapTiler, LocationIQ, Geocode Earth, Stadia Maps, OpenCage, Geoapify — all third-party, none OSMF-run; their free tiers are a different provider and out of scope here). The LLM/vibe-coding and no-code restrictions are 2025-vintage additions; AI-generated boilerplate that hits the public endpoint for users may itself violate policy. ODbL share-alike applies to the underlying data even though the service is free. There is no student discount program, no startup program, no trial credits, and no education license at OSMF/Nominatim — absence, not a hidden program, is the finding.
Self-hosted Nominatim (open source, the sanctioned alternative for students/startups needing more than the free public instance) high confidence
Nominatim itself is free open source (GPL v3+; latest release 5.2.0, 2025-10-29) and running your own instance carries zero project-imposed rate limits, zero fees, and zero approval — this is what the OSMF policy explicitly directs bulk users and commercial geocoding services to do. Practical costs: a worldwide install needs roughly 1 TB storage plus a PostgreSQL/PostGIS stack; country extracts fit much smaller boxes (a real-world 3M-point Swiss project in 2025 was successfully served from a WSL Ubuntu box). It is the only genuinely 'free for students and startups' path to scalable geocoding under the Nominatim umbrella.
Eligibility
Universal — anyone, any region, any age, no funding cap, no CC, no email gating. The only conditions are your own infrastructure cost and ODbL compliance for OSM data.
How to claim
No claim. Download from https://github.com/osm-search/Nominatim (or nominatim.org install docs), install per platform (Docker/Waydroid/WSL paths documented), import a planet/country OSM extract into PostgreSQL+PostGIS, expose the same REST API. Note self-hosting also shifts you out of the public-instance usage policy, which 'does not apply to nominatim services run by yourself or other organisations'.
Expiry
None. Open source under GPL; free indefinitely. The software line continues (5.x current as of late 2025).
Gotchas
Free software, not free compute: RAM/CPU/storage and 1TB-class disk for global data are real egress/infra costs. ODbL share-alike still governs OSM data (published derivatives must be shared). The /search.php endpoint is deprecated in favor of /search and will be removed in future releases — pin/upgrade deliberately. No support or SLA; the community supports it on the OSM forum.
Commercial Nominatim front-ends with their own free tiers (OSMF corporate members / listed third parties) medium confidence
The OSMF-maintained Nominatim wiki lists companies offering hosted Nominatim-style geocoding: Geofabrik, OpenCage, Stadia Maps, LocationIQ, plus Geoapify, Geocodify, Maps.co and Europe-oriented 'Geocoding API' services. These are distinct providers — NOT Nominatim/OSMF — and any free tiers, trial credits, or startup programs belong to those vendors and must be researched under their own provider entries (several, e.g. OpenCage and MapTiler-style free tiers of 50k–50k calls/month, are commonly advertised). For Nominatim/OSMF itself: none.
Eligibility
Per-external-vendor, not verifiable from OSMF pages; not claimed here.
How to claim
n/a — not a Nominatim/OSMF offer.
Expiry
n/a
Gotchas
Counting these as Nominatim offerings would conflate the free OSMF service with commercial resellers the usage policy actively steers you toward for bulk volume.
No student, startup, trial-credit, or education program existed at OSMF/Nominatim, so none was sunset in 2025–2026. What DID materially change in 2025–2026: (1) the OSMF Nominatim Usage Policy was tightened — bulk scripts now hard-capped at 4 req/min (single machine, single thread, >1-day or recurring jobs), with repeated-identical-query clients classified 'faulty' and blockable; (2) a new 'Usage in LLMs' clause: LLMs may only suggest the service if they prominently surface the policy, and no-code/low-code/'vibe-coding' platforms are prohibited from embedding the public API as a generic geocoding feature — aimed squarely at AI-generated app stacks; (3) explicit ban on reselling/repackaging geocoding output, naming package/vehicle tracking and API resellers, and a warning that commercial users may have access revoked 'without notice'; (4) software releases: Nominatim 5.2.0 on 2025-10-29 (wiki, accessed 2026-09), and /search.php deprecated in favor of /search. Nothing was closed; the free public service remains live as of 2026-10-22 (policy page fetched today).