Resources // LLM Tokens

GitHub Models

Offer Free multi-model API

Suits for Non-VC-backedVC-backedCreatorsResearchersOpen-source

Updated Jun 2026

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The offer

Free, rate-limited access to a multi-vendor catalog (OpenAI GPT-4.1 / 4o / o-series and the GPT-5 family, Meta Llama, DeepSeek-R1, xAI Grok, Mistral, Microsoft Phi, and more) through a single GitHub token
OpenAI-compatible REST endpoint and Azure AI Inference SDK: works in the Playground, VS Code (AI Toolkit), GitHub Actions, and any OpenAI client
Free limits are tiered: "Low" models ~15 requests/min and 150/day; "High" models ~10/min and 50/day; reasoning models (DeepSeek-R1, Grok) are tighter at roughly 8-15/day
Limits scale up with your Copilot plan (Free, Pro, Business, Enterprise), but the base tier needs no paid plan
Inputs are not used for training, and org admins can allow or deny specific models

Who qualifies

Open to any GitHub account, no credit card, no application form
To start: create a fine-grained personal access token with the `models:read` scope and call the endpoint
Billing for Models is separate from Copilot, so a paid Copilot subscription is NOT required for the free tier
Built for prototyping, not production: per-day caps (single digits on reasoning models) make sustained workloads impossible without opting into paid usage or bringing your own OpenAI/Azure key
Several features are still labelled "public preview" and may change

Community Insights

Developers rate GitHub Models as the easiest way to get free, no-credit-card access to many frontier models at once for quick experiments. Simon Willison and others recommend it for kicking the tires before committing to one provider. The recurring caveat is that the free limits are very low (single digits to a few dozen requests per day on the better models), so it is squarely a prototyping and learning tool rather than something you build a product on. There is also some confusion about whether a paid Copilot plan is required. It is not.

Best Practices (from community tips)

Compare models side by side in the Playground before committing to one, then export the Code tab to your language and SDK.
Scope your token to models:read only. Generate a fine-grained PAT, store it as an env var, never inline it.
Write against the OpenAI-compatible SDK so you can swap to a paid provider later with just a base-URL and key change.
Batch your experiments. With ~8-50 requests/day on premium models, design prompt tests to be deliberate rather than spamming the rate limiter.
When you outgrow the free limits, opt into pay-as-you-go or bring your own OpenAI/Azure key rather than fighting the caps.