Best offer on record: Free API plans (no credit card): 1,000 req/hour, 500,000 req/month hard caps. 2 verified findings, checked 2026-10-22.
Offers
Free API plans (no credit card): 1,000 req/hour, 500,000 req/month hard caps high confidence
Thousands of public APIs on the RapidAPI hub offer a free tier requiring no credit card and no subscription. Every 'Free API' plan is hard-capped at 1,000 requests/hour AND 500,000 requests/month; exceeding either returns HTTP 429 Too Many Requests. Usage above that cap must move to a paid plan. The 500K/month cap is the platform-wide max a zero-price plan may allow: any plan exceeding 500K requests/month must charge at least $0.00003 per call (minimum-price floor, so e.g. a 2M-call plan must cost at least $45/month).
Eligibility
Any RapidAPI consumer account. No .edu email, no startup age/funding cap, no documented region restriction, and credit card NOT required for the 'Free' API category. Caution: freemium APIs DO require a credit card even for their $0 free plan, and Pay-Per-Use/Paid APIs require a card — so 'free' only means the Free category.
How to claim
Create a free RapidAPI developer account (no card). Open any free-API listing from https://rapidapi.com/collection/list-of-free-apis; for 'Free' category APIs you call endpoints directly or generate an API key with no subscription and no credit-card step.
Expiry
Ongoing; free plans persist while the API provider keeps them enabled. Providers can disable/modify pricing plans at any time (existing subscribers keep the old plan version).
Gotchas
(1) Trial-vs-free: a 'free' plan on a freemium API still demands a credit card — check the API's category before relying on no-card access. (2) Since December 2025 a Bandwidth Platform Fee applies to each subscription (including free plans): 10 GB/billing cycle free, then $1 per additional 1 GB (~$0.001/MB), charged to the consumer with no free-plan carve-out — a high-bandwidth consumer of a $0 plan can still be billed. (3) 429 hard-stop at the caps; no overage billing on free plans, just rejection. (4) Daily-quota plans reset 24h from subscription time, not midnight.
Bandwidth platform fee: 10 GB/month included free per subscription, $1 per additional GB (Dec 2025) high confidence
RapidAPI's 'Connecting to an API' docs state: 'Starting December 2025, each subscription will include 10 GB of bandwidth per billing cycle at no cost. After that limit, a fee of $1 per additional 1 GB of traffic will apply, calculated proportionally based on total usage. This fee will be charged to the consumer.' Reference figure: average request ~2 KB, so ~100GB ≈ 50M requests before any charge.
Eligibility
All RapidAPI consumer subscriptions, free or paid.
How to claim
Nothing to claim — applied automatically to every API subscription (including $0 plans) starting December 2025.
Expiry
In effect since December 2025; ongoing as of 2026-10-22.
Gotchas
This is a cost add, not a benefit: even a $0 Basic plan can accrue a consumer bill above 10 GB/month; free plans receive the same 10 GB grant but the docs show no carve-out from the $1/GB overage.
As of 2026-10-22 there is NO RapidAPI student, education, or startup program: no .edu licensing, no startup credit/trial-credit offer, no startup-age or funding-cap eligibility — the official docs/FAQ pages (updated through mid-2025) contain no mention of any such offer, and no 2025-2026 announcement of one was found. The only material 2025-2026 change is consumer-side: the December 2025 Bandwidth Platform Fee (10 GB free/cycle, then $1/GB charged to the consumer), which partially erodes the 'free' story for free plans. The core free offer stands: no-credit-card free API plans capped at 1,000 req/hour and 500K req/month (confirmed on the official monetization docs). Note: the session's web-search budget was exhausted partway through; findings above are based on official docs pages fetched today (high confidence), while the absence of student/startup programs is asserted from the official pages' silence (medium confidence that none exists on a dedicated marketing page that was not reachable).