BlockRun
- Free allowance
- 7 of 117 model ids on /v1/models carry an input price of 0; the rest carry list prices spanning openai, google, anthropic, xai, zai, bytedance, deepseek, qwen, nvidia and eleven other families
- Verdict
- caveatusable, with a named limit or an unprobed read path
- Cost
- free tier
- Identity
- anonymousno card, no phone
- Binding limit
- request-rateunpublished at BlockRun. The free route fails with FREE_MODEL_FAILED carrying debug 'NVIDIA API error: 429 Too Many Requests', so the observed ceiling belongs to BlockRun's own upstream key; 30 requests per minute (burst) and 300...
- Evidence
- measured13 sources; a live request was made and its output kept
- Freshness
- stale on 2026-12-05checked 2026-11-04 (live); stale on 2026-12-05
| Free tier | 7 of 117 model ids on /v1/models carry an input price of 0; the rest carry list prices spanning openai, google, anthropic, xai, zai, bytedance, deepseek, qwen, nvidia and eleven other families unit tokens; metered on request-count; the seven zero-priced ids are nvidia/nemotron-3-nano-omni-30b-a3b-reasoning, nvidia/nemotron-3.5-lightning, nvidia/llama-3.2-11b-vision, nvidia/nemotron-3-ultra-550b, cohere/north-mini-code, poolside/laguna-xs-2.1 and nvidia/muse-glimmer-30b |
|---|---|
| Price | none stated |
| Limits |
|
| Binding | request-rate the upstream NVIDIA 429 binds, and it arrives inside a 200-style error body rather than as a 429 status, so a client cannot see it by status code |
| Identity | anonymous no Authorization header sent and none required for the free route |
| Egress | not published |
| Interface | rest |
| Tooling | any OpenAI-compatible client; curl against POST {base}/chat/completions |
| Composes with | pairs with a free-standing agent as a relay of last resort; the scarce link is BlockRun's own upstream key, because its 429 arrives as FREE_MODEL_FAILED inside a 200 |
| Reliability | 5 sequential identical calls answered 2 and refused 3 with FREE_MODEL_FAILED and a debug field naming 'NVIDIA API error: 429 Too Many Requests' |
| Notes | The relay category's clearest instance. An error body that names a different vendor's API is the cheapest available tell, and the echoed model string is the second. A caller that does not compare the echoed model receives a plausible answer from a model it did not choose. |
| Evidence note | measured the relay is proved by its own error body naming NVIDIA, and the substitution by the echoed model string. Both are measured; the upstream arrangement is inferred from them. |
| Parsed numbers |
|
Evidence 13
| date | source | what it proved |
|---|---|---|
| 2026-10-22 | probe: https://blockrun.ai/api/v1/chat/completions | nvidia/gpt-oss-20b answered 200 and echoed nvidia/gpt-oss-20b's two runs, 2091 ms and 2543 ms, 51 completion tokens each |
| 2026-10-22 | probe: https://blockrun.ai/api/v1/chat/completions | in the recon sweep eight minutes earlier, one of five sequential calls echoed nvidia/nemotron-3-super-120b for a nvidia/gpt-oss-20b request, and three returned FREE_MODEL_FAILED with debug 'NVIDIA API error: 429 Too Many Requests' |
| 2026-10-22 | blockrun.ai/api/v1/models | 117 model ids across 13 or more vendor families including openai, anthropic, google, xai and elevenlabs, with per-model long_context price tiers |
| 2026-10-28 | blockrun.ai/docs/api-reference/rate-limits | the documented over-limit 429 carries Retry-After, X-RateLimit-Limit: 30, X-RateLimit-Remaining and X-RateLimit-Reset (unix milliseconds); a separate 429 with code FREE_MODEL_FAILED and Retry-After: 30 signals an exhausted free pool |
| 2026-10-28 | blockrun.ai/free | the vendor documents that a busy free model is answered by another free model and that the model field names the one that answered |
| 2026-10-28 | probe: https://blockrun.ai/api/v1/chat/completions | one POST with no Authorization header for nvidia/nemotron-3.5-lightning answered 200 and echoed model nvidia/nemotron-3.5-lightning-nim; headers x-free-model: true, x-health-reroute: true, x-original-model: nvidia/nemotron-3.5-lightning, x-served-model: nvidia/nemotron-3.5-lightning-nim; no X-RateLimit header on the 200; content was a reasoning trace with finish_reason length at max_tokens 128 |
| 2026-10-28 | blockrun.ai/docs/api-reference/errors | the error catalogue lists FREE_TIER_RATE_LIMITED as the 429 per-IP free-tier limit of 30 per minute and 300 per hour |
| 2026-10-28 | blockrun.ai/docs/api-reference/rate-limits | free-model pool exhaustion surfaces as FREE_MODEL_FAILED (non-streaming) or STREAM_FAILED (streaming), published as 429 with Retry-After 30 |
| 2026-10-28 | blockrun.ai/docs/api-reference/rate-limits | free chat models need no wallet and no payment |
| 2026-10-28 | blockrun.ai/docs/api-reference/rate-limits | the free-route limit is a per-IP request-rate limit, so the limit kind request-rate stands |
| 2026-11-04 | blockrun.ai/docs/api-reference/rate-limits | the vendor publishes a per-IP free-tier limit of 30 per minute and 300 per hour |
| 2026-11-04 | blockrun.ai/docs/api-reference/errors | the error catalogue names FREE_TIER_RATE_LIMITED as the per-IP free-tier 429 at 30 per minute and 300 per hour |
| 2026-11-04 | blockrun.ai/docs/api-reference/rate-limits | the free route is still limited per source IP by request rate |
Unknown values 3
- egress metered: egress metering was not published
- per object cap stated: the field does not apply to this kind of offer
- retention stated: the field does not apply to this kind of offer