Free AI API in India

Free AI API in India — Qwen3 1.7B, ₹0 forever

unoblox runs a genuinely free AI API tier: Qwen3 1.7B at ₹0, no payment method needed to sign up, no card, no trial countdown. It's meant for prototyping, testing, and low-traffic production apps that don't need frontier-model reasoning.

The free tier, plainly

Feature	Qwen3 1.7B (Free)
Cost	₹0 / month
Payment method required	No
Rate limit	100 requests/min per key
Monthly cap	Freemium cap (typically ₹250–₹1,000 worth of usage, plan-dependent)
Support	Community + docs
Context window	32K tokens

Once usage would exceed the cap, you simply move the same code to a paid model — nothing breaks, nothing double-bills.

What the free tier is actually good for

• Simple chat and support bots — FAQ-style Q&A under moderate volume.
• Classification — sentiment, ticket tagging, intent routing.
• Templated generation — short-form copy, meta descriptions, boilerplate replies.
• Extraction — pulling structured fields out of emails, invoices, forms.
• Summarization — meeting notes, short articles, ticket threads.

For these narrow, well-defined tasks, a 1.7B model is usually accurate enough that upgrading wouldn't change the outcome — it would just add cost.

When to graduate off free

There's no forced upgrade, but three signals usually mean it's time:

1. Output quality visibly degrades on your specific task — move to Qwen3 235B-A22B (₹9.07 / ₹55.44 per 1M tokens) first; it's the cheapest meaningful step up.
2. You need vision or long-context reasoning — Qwen3.8-27B (₹16.32 / ₹48.96) adds vision; Llama 4 Scout (₹10.08 / ₹30.24) is the cheapest pure-text upgrade.
3. You hit the monthly cap consistently — at that point the free tier has already done its job (validating the product); paying a few hundred rupees a month is a rounding error against what you're building.

The API key and endpoint don't change when you upgrade — only the model field does.

Sample code

from openai import OpenAI

client = OpenAI(api_key="ub-gw-YOUR_KEY", base_url="https://api.unoblox.ai/v1")

response = client.chat.completions.create(
    model="qwen/qwen3-1.7b",
    messages=[
        {"role": "user", "content": "What is machine learning in one sentence?"}
    ]
)

print(response.choices[0].message.content)

Fair use, not surveillance

unoblox doesn't monitor content for competitive reasons — it rate-limits to prevent abuse (synthetic content farms, key reselling, scripted hammering). A normal app, even a fairly busy one, rarely brushes up against 100 requests/minute.

Frequently asked questions

Is the free tier really free, or a time-limited trial? It's not a trial. Qwen3 1.7B stays at ₹0 with no sunset date. The only limits are the per-minute rate limit and the freemium usage cap.

Do I need to enter payment details to start? No. Sign up with email and password, generate a key, and start calling the API immediately.

How does free-tier quality compare to paid models? For narrow tasks (classification, templated generation, short summarization) it's usually close enough that most teams don't notice a difference. For open-ended reasoning or long-form analysis, a paid model does meaningfully better.

What happens when I hit the rate limit? You get a 429 response. Add basic client-side backoff, or move to a paid key tier if you're consistently bumping into it.

Can I run real production traffic on the free tier? Yes, within the rate limit and monthly cap — plenty of low-traffic features (internal tools, early-stage products) stay on it indefinitely.

Is there a limit on how many free keys I can create? Keys are scoped to your account, not unlimited per person — create what your project structure actually needs (e.g., one per environment).

Get started in rupees → https://unoblox.ai/sign-in