Nous Research / Nous Portal
9 model routes currently listed at zero price.
https://inference-api.nousresearch.com/v1Models mentioned
inclusionai/ling-3.1-flashinclusionai/ling-3.0-flash-sante:freepoolside/laguna-s-2.1:freepoolside/laguna-xs-2.1:freeupstage/solar-mini4:freemeituan/longcat-2.0:freeinclusionai/ling-3.0-flash-fin:freestepfun/step-3.7-flash:freemeituan/longcat-2.5-preview:freeEquivalent paid value
How this was valued: The published allowance or a defensible paid comparison is not precise enough to calculate.
Current Free plan publishes only Standard rate limits; exact quotas are account-specific. The earlier50RPM/500KTPM portal observation is not reproduced by current first-party content and cannot establish today's finite allowance. Zero-price model metadata proves pricing, not a quantitative throughput grant.
Limits and terms
- Public Numeric Limits
- No
- Official Text
- Standard rate limits
- Caveat
- The public free-plan page checked on 2026-10-06 no longer exposes the earlier observed 50 RPM and 500k TPM. Signed-in account limits remain authoritative.
What happens to your prompts?
Current Portal terms permit default payload storage, training, improvement, and third-party licensing. Privacy Mode is an opt-in with security and operational exceptions and does not govern independent upstreams.
- Plan Scope
- Nous Portal free hosted inference; optional Privacy Mode applies prospectively.
- Prompt Retention
- Default terms permit storage; no fixed payload retention duration is published. Privacy Mode excludes ordinary payload storage with security, operation, legal, fraud, and abuse exceptions.
- Response Retention
- Same as prompts.
- Ordinary Logging
- Operational metadata can be kept even in Privacy Mode.
- Model Training
- Default terms permit training. Privacy Mode opts payloads out prospectively, subject to published exceptions.
- Product Improvement
- Default terms permit improvement, development, commercialization, and third-party licensing. Privacy Mode excludes ordinary payload improvement and support use.
- Human Or Operator Access
- Support and security processing is permitted; access roles are not fully specified.
- Subprocessors And Routing
- Content can reach model providers and other parties under independent terms; Privacy Mode controls Nous only.
- Deletion Controls
- Account privacy controls and requests; Privacy Mode need not undo earlier use or incorporation into models.
- Caveat
- The Portal now publishes governing policies. Opt-in Privacy Mode is not a default no-training guarantee or an end-to-end upstream guarantee.
Governing documents
- Terms Of Service
- https://portal.nousresearch.com/terms
- Privacy Policy
- https://portal.nousresearch.com/privacy
Eligibility
- Account Required
- Yes
- Plan
- Free: $0/month
- Payment Method Required
- not explicitly documented
Primary sources
Before you build with Nous Research / Nous Portal
Read the classification narrowly
This record has current first-party evidence for some zero-cost hosted inference. The label describes the bounded offer supported by evidence on 2026-10-06; it does not guarantee permanence, production suitability, uptime, latency, model quality, or access from every region.
Resolve the live model route
This snapshot records 9 model IDs. Match the exact ID against the provider's live catalog before using it in code; zero-price routes and aliases can rotate while an older documentation page remains online. The recorded base endpoint is https://inference-api.nousresearch.com/v1, but the provider's current API reference remains authoritative for paths, authentication, and request shape.
Confirm account and billing boundaries
An account is required, so public catalog evidence cannot by itself prove the limits, balance, or billing behavior attached to your workspace. The reviewed evidence explicitly says no payment card is required. Re-check the signup flow because eligibility and billing controls can change after the snapshot. The equivalent paid value shown here prices a documented allowance where possible; it is not cash, guaranteed savings, or protection from overage.
Re-read the prompt policy for your plan
This record classifies the reviewed handling as “Not private”: Current Portal terms permit default payload storage, training, improvement, and third-party licensing. Privacy Mode is an opt-in with security and operational exceptions and does not govern independent upstreams. Provider policies can distinguish free, paid, enterprise, opted-in, and feature-specific traffic, so verify the governing terms for the exact account and route that will receive your data.
Follow the evidence, then re-check it
The record links 10 first-party sources covering the offer, catalog, limits, pricing, terms, privacy, or adoption evidence available to the audit. Prefer the newest governing document or live catalog when sources disagree, and submit a correction when a provider changes a material term.
Match the quota to the workload shape
Translate the published allowance into the traffic pattern you actually expect instead of comparing headline totals alone. A daily token pool can look generous while a low requests-per-minute or concurrency ceiling blocks interactive bursts; a high request limit can still fail a long-context job when input, output, or per-request tokens are capped. Separate prompt tokens from generated tokens, include retries and tool calls, and test the largest realistic payload. If the provider documents more than one limit window, the tightest window at your peak load is the practical ceiling. Research, experimental, and community access can also carry eligibility or fair-use constraints that cannot be modeled as a simple number.
Plan fallback without changing the rules
A fallback should preserve more than API syntax. Confirm that the substitute route supports the required modality, context length, streaming behavior, structured output, tools, and safety controls, then compare its prompt-retention and training terms. An OpenAI-compatible request shape does not make providers operationally or contractually equivalent. Decide which errors may trigger a retry, cap retry storms, and prevent an exhausted free route from silently switching to a billable model. If deterministic output matters, record the model revision and sampling settings; rotating aliases and free-model pools can change behavior even when the endpoint remains available.
Monitor the offer as a dependency
Capture the model ID, response model field, rate-limit headers, usage fields, latency, HTTP status, and any provider request identifier for each test. Watch for authorization failures, quota exhaustion, catalog removal, policy revisions, and dashboard balance changes as separate failure modes. Re-check the provider’s live catalog and governing pages on a schedule proportionate to the workload’s importance, and keep the dated sources that supported your decision. Free capacity is especially suitable for prototypes, evaluations, fallbacks, and bounded workloads when the application can tolerate change; a production dependency still needs observability, an exit path, and an owner responsible for re-verification.
Test one complete request before scaling
Start with the smallest permitted request using the exact credential, model ID, endpoint, and account type you intend to deploy. Record the HTTP status, response headers, usage fields, latency, and any dashboard balance change. Then exercise the failure path: an invalid model, an exhausted quota, or a rate-limit response should fail clearly without silently switching to a paid route. If the provider supports streaming or tool calls, validate those features separately because a free model can expose a narrower capability set than its paid counterpart. Keep a budget ceiling outside the application whenever billing is possible, and avoid sending sensitive data until the observed route matches the reviewed data agreement.