What's free
New accounts receive free credits; Baseten's current pricing page does not state the amount
Rate limits
Model APIs are priced per token; dedicated deployments are priced by compute time (per minute)
The catch
Basic is $0/month, pay as you go. Current pricing confirms new-account credits but does not publish an amount or expiration date
Quickstart — chat completions
from openai import OpenAI
client = OpenAI(base_url="https://inference.baseten.co/v1", api_key="<YOUR_FREE_API_KEY>")
resp = client.chat.completions.create(
model="<a-free-model>",
messages=[{"role": "user", "content": "Hello!"}],
)
print(resp.choices[0].message.content)…or with curl:
curl https://inference.baseten.co/v1/chat/completions \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $API_KEY" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{"model":"<a-free-model>","messages":[{"role":"user","content":"Hello!"}]}'