Dear OpenAI Team,

First, thank you for building such an excellent API platform and continuously improving the developer experience.

I would like to share a suggestion regarding API development and integration.

Currently, developers need to use paid API credits from the very beginning of integration and testing. While this is understandable for production usage, it can create a barrier during the initial development phase, especially for independent developers, students, and open-source projects that need to experiment with request formats, streaming, structured outputs, error handling, and model compatibility before deploying an application.

It would be extremely helpful if OpenAI could offer a small free API quota for selected models dedicated to development and testing. This could be implemented with strict limits, such as:

• A limited number of requests per day.
• Lower rate limits (RPM/TPM).
• Availability only on lightweight or mini models.
• Usage restricted to development and testing purposes.

A similar approach is offered by Google Gemini, where some models are available with a free tier and rate limits. Although the free quota is limited, it significantly lowers the barrier for developers to integrate and evaluate the API before committing to paid usage.

Providing a modest free development tier would make it easier for more developers to adopt the OpenAI API, encourage experimentation, reduce integration friction, and likely increase long-term adoption of paid services.

Thank you for considering this suggestion and for your continued work on the OpenAI platform.

Best regards,
A Developer and OpenAI API User

Thanks for taking the time to share this feedback @Dylan_Li

I'll pass it along to the team for consideration.