Together AI Has No Free Tier, and It Now Costs $15 to Find Out
The open-weight catalogue is the widest in the market. Getting a key that works is now a $15 question.
Together AI does not offer a free tier and does not offer free trial credits. Its billing documentation states that platform access requires a minimum $15 credit purchase for a first purchase, with a $5 minimum on top-ups afterwards. Accounts are fully prepaid, so a balance of zero suspends API access until more credit is added. The $25 signup credit that older guides still describe is gone.1
Fifteen dollars is not a large amount. The reason it matters is what it tells you about the direction of developer infrastructure this year, and what it forces you to decide before you have written a line of code.
What the billing page actually says
| Item | Together AI |
|---|---|
| Free tier | None |
| Free trial credits | None |
| Minimum first purchase | $15 |
| Minimum after that | $5 |
| Billing model | Fully prepaid |
| When the balance hits zero | API access suspended |
| Auto-recharge | Available, card charged when balance drops below a threshold |
Prices measured on 27 October 2026. Vendor plan terms, allowances and prices change without notice, so treat every figure on this page as a dated snapshot rather than a permanent fact. Where a number here differs from the vendor's own pricing page, the vendor's page is correct and the figure above is simply older than it.
The wording is unusually direct for a pricing page. Together does not currently offer free trials, access requires that minimum purchase, and the platform is fully prepaid with a positive balance required at all times.
Why the fifteen is worth understanding rather than complaining about
The straightforward reading is that this is a worse deal than it was two years ago. The more useful reading is that it is an honest one. A prepaid balance suspends rather than bills, which means a runaway loop costs you the balance and nothing more. There is no invoice waiting at the end of the month and no card on file quietly absorbing an agent that retried for six hours.
That is a real protection, and it is one most providers do not offer. The trade is that you cannot evaluate the platform without spending. Anyone comparing five inference providers has to put money into four of them to make the comparison, which quietly excludes anyone who is not ready to.
A second effect is easy to miss. A fifteen-dollar threshold filters out the casual test and still admits anyone serious, so the platform carries fewer dormant accounts and more users who have already committed. That is a business choice rather than a defect, and pricing it in is part of choosing Together as a first API.
Does the minimum apply to fine-tuning and dedicated endpoints?
Yes, and it bites harder there. Together requires enough balance to cover the cost of creating a dedicated endpoint, a fine-tuning job or an evaluation job before the job is accepted. A fine-tune that costs more than your balance does not start partway and wait; it does not start.
That makes the balance a working-capital question rather than a subscription one. For serverless inference a fifteen-dollar top-up is a month of small-model experiments. For a fine-tuning run it can be a fraction of a single job, which is a different kind of commitment and worth budgeting before the first API call rather than after it.
What a first purchase of $15 buys
At Together's serverless rates the answer is a surprising amount of work on small models and a short experiment on large ones. The catalogue covers more than two hundred open-weight models across text, image, video, audio and embeddings, with the same per-token billing you would get direct from the model authors plus batch discounts.
The practical consequence is that $15 is a development budget rather than a production one. It is enough to build against a real API, measure what your prompts cost at token level, and size a monthly number from evidence. It is not a free trial in the sense the phrase used to carry, where a small project could run indefinitely at no cost.
What survives if you have nothing to spend
The free API route that still works is Google's, within published free-tier limits and on models Google chooses to include. Google's free tier is narrower than it was in 2025 and no longer publishes rate limits, but it exists without a card.
For hosted inference specifically, Cloudflare Workers AI keeps a free allocation of 10,000 Neurons a day on any account, including the Workers free plan, resetting at midnight UTC. That is not a large model budget, and some of the newer models on the platform require a billing method, but it is a free path to a working endpoint.
Neither replaces Together's catalogue. The point is only that the absence of a free tier is a reason to start elsewhere, not a reason to stop.
Which model does the $15 minimum hurt most
The person evaluating for a side project. A funded team spending $15 to test an API is not a decision. A solo developer choosing between four providers, who has to fund three of them to see how they behave, is now comparing a $45 outlay against a product that may not be right.
That is where the choice bites, and it is worth making deliberately. If you are at that stage, pick the one provider whose free route you can actually use, build the integration against it, and move the spend later once you know what your workload costs. The API layer is portable; the evaluation cost is not.
Frequently asked questions
Does Together AI have a free tier?
No. Access requires a minimum $15 credit purchase, and there are no free trial credits.
Is there a cheaper way in?
No, though the minimum drops to $5 on purchases after the first one.
What happens when my balance runs out?
API access is suspended until the balance is topped up. Auto-recharge can do that for you.
Can I pay as I go instead of prepaying?
The platform is described as fully prepaid. Balance is added before use, not billed afterwards.
Do startup credits exist?
Yes, through a separate accelerator programme that is applied for and funded separately from the standard billing path.
The absence of a free tier or free trial, the $15 minimum first purchase, the $5 top-up minimum, prepaid billing, the balance-suspension rule and auto-recharge verified in Together AI's billing documentation, read on 9 November 2026. The $25 signup credit quoted by older comparison articles is not in that documentation.
Sources
- Together AI billing: free trial and access requirements: docs.together.ai/docs/billing. Used for: No free tier or free trial, the $15 minimum first purchase, $5 top-ups, prepaid billing, suspension at zero balance and auto-recharge.
All sources are the vendor's own plan or documentation pages, checked on 27 October 2026. Plan terms change without notice, so confirm current limits before you rely on them.
