Text · segment

Best free

Real free output — not a trial.

No independent measure ranks this whole set, so no crown. Shortlist ordered by Free tier; the basis is stated, not hidden.

13 eligibledata as of 2026-07-04

Claude Fable 5 Anthropic A live

API & price: $10 / $50 per 1M (cache hit $1)
Context: 1M
Weights: closed
Multimodal: text+image
Free tier: limited (chat app)

Quality 60Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index (#1 of 170) ↗

Best freeBest for APIMultimodal ✓ 2026-07-04

Claude Opus 4.8 Anthropic A live

API & price: $5 / $25 per 1M (cache hit $0.50)
Context: 1M
Weights: closed
Multimodal: text+image
Free tier: limited (chat app)

Quality 56Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index (#2 of 170) ↗

Best freeBest for APIMultimodal ✓ 2026-07-04

Gemini 3.1 Pro Google DeepMind A live

API & price: $2.00 / $12.00 per 1M (<=200K); $4.00 / $18.00 above
Context: 1M
Weights: closed
Multimodal: text+image+audio+video
Free tier: limited (chat app)

Quality 46Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index ↗

Best freeBest for APIMultimodal ✓ 2026-07-04

GPT-5.5 OpenAI A live

API & price: $5.00 / $30.00 per 1M (cached in $0.50)
Context: 1M
Weights: closed
Multimodal: text+image
Free tier: limited (chat app)

Quality 55Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index ↗

Best freeBest for APIMultimodal ✓ 2026-07-04

Grok 4.3 xAI A live

API & price: $1.25 / $2.50 per 1M
Context: 1M
Weights: closed
Multimodal: text+image
Free tier: limited (chat app)

Quality 38Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index ↗

Best freeBest for APIMultimodal ✓ 2026-07-04

Command A+ Cohere A live

API & price: no first-party per-token price published (Apache-2.0 self-host free)
Context: 128K
Weights: open · Apache-2.0
Multimodal: text+image
Free tier: open self-host

Quality 23Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index ↗

Best freeBest for APIOpen-weightsMultimodal ✓ 2026-07-04

DeepSeek-V4-Pro DeepSeek A live

API & price: $0.44 / $0.87 per 1M (cache-hit in $0.004)
Context: 1M
Weights: open · MIT
Multimodal: text only
Free tier: open self-host

Quality 44Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index ↗

Best freeBest for APIOpen-weights ✓ 2026-07-04

GLM-5.2 Zhipu AI A live

API & price: $1.40 / $4.40 per 1M (cache-hit in $0.26)
Context: 1M
Weights: open · MIT
Multimodal: text only
Free tier: open self-host

Quality 51Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index (leading open-weights) ↗

Best freeBest for APIOpen-weights ✓ 2026-07-04

Kimi K2.6 Moonshot AI A live

API & price: $0.95 / $4.00 per 1M (cache-hit in $0.16)
Context: 256K
Weights: open · Modified MIT
Multimodal: text+image
Free tier: open self-host

Quality 43Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index ↗

Best freeBest for APIOpen-weightsMultimodal ✓ 2026-07-04

Llama 4 Maverick Meta A live

API & price: no first-party API; weights free to self-host (hosted ~$0.35 / $0.85 per 1M)
Context: 1M
Weights: open · Llama 4 Community License
Multimodal: text+image
Free tier: open self-host

Quality 14Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index ↗

Best freeBest for APIOpen-weightsMultimodal ✓ 2026-07-04

MiniMax M3 MiniMax A live

API & price: $0.30 / $1.20 per 1M (secondary)
Context: 1M
Weights: open · minimax-community
Multimodal: text+image+video
Free tier: open self-host

Quality 44Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index ↗

Best freeBest for APIOpen-weightsMultimodal ✓ 2026-07-04

Mistral Large 3 Mistral AI A live

API & price: $0.50 / $1.50 per 1M
Context: 256K
Weights: open · Apache-2.0
Multimodal: text+image
Free tier: open self-host

Quality 16Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index ↗

Best freeBest for APIOpen-weightsMultimodal ✓ 2026-07-04

Qwen3.5-397B-A17B Alibaba A live

API & price: $0.60 / $3.60 per 1M (Model Studio, intl)
Context: 256K
Weights: open · Apache-2.0
Multimodal: text+image+video
Free tier: open self-host

Quality 45Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index (#3 open-weights) ↗

Best freeBest for APIOpen-weightsMultimodal ✓ 2026-07-04