Databricks: Foundation Model APIs (Free Edition workspace)
Databricks Free Edition is a no-cost, serverless-only, quota-limited account for personal, academic, learning, experimentation, and other non-commercial or not-for-profit use. It has daily fair-use limits; exceeding quota can shut down compute for the rest of the day and, in extreme cases, the rest of the month. Model serving has a limited number of active endpoints, no GPU serving endpoints, no provisioned throughput, no custom models on GPU or batch inference, and some models are unavailable.
The terms in full
Databricks Free Edition is a no-cost, serverless-only, quota-limited account for personal, academic, learning, experimentation, and other non-commercial or not-for-profit use. It has daily fair-use limits; exceeding quota can shut down compute for the rest of the day and, in extreme cases, the rest of the month. Model serving has a limited number of active endpoints, no GPU serving endpoints, no provisioned throughput, no custom models on GPU or batch inference, and some models are unavailable.
- When it runs out Requests are rejected (429) until the window resets.
- Clock No expiration. Daily usage limits apply, and extreme overage can suspend compute for the rest of the month. Databricks may delete accounts inactive for a prolonged period.
- Region Available to qualified users who are legally eligible. The Free Edition terms exclude sanctioned persons and persons located or organized in sanctioned countries or territories. A complete supported-country list is not stated.
Models
The Free Edition supports experimenting with foundation models and deploying AI systems, but Databricks does not publish a Free-Edition-specific list of included foundation models. The limitation page explicitly says certain models are unavailable.
Signup, payment, data
- Signup required: users choose a signup method and Databricks creates a Free Edition workspace; authentication is limited to email OTP, Google, or Microsoft
- Card / payment not required: Databricks explicitly says no credit card or payment is required
- Training Provider says it may use your prompts or outputs to train or improve models.
- Data terms Offer-wide: Databricks explicitly reserves the right to train on Free Edition users' data. This differs from some separately documented Databricks AI assistive features that say prompts and responses are not used to train generative foundation models.
What the provider's page says
Every structured number above is backed by one of these quotes, checked verbatim against the page our crawler fetched. A field with no quote is shown as not stated.
- payment “No credit card or payment required” source
- at exhaustion “If you exceed your quota, your workspace's compute resources will be shut down and unavailable for the rest of the day (and in extreme cases, the rest of the month). While your compute will be unavailable, your data and settings will not…” source
Evidence pages, re-read nightly
Change history
No confirmed change to this program since tracking began. The nightly re-read still runs; a change that survives two consecutive reads lands here.
Evidence and scope
- Last verified
- 2026-10-01 (recheck due 2026-10-31)
- Evidence standard
- Provider-owned pricing, quota, limits, model or account pages only; third-party lists are never evidence.
- Data
- program.json, and the whole inventory at free-access.json (CC BY 4.0)
LLM Price Index lists what the provider publishes and links the page it came from. It does not test speed or quality, and a free route can change or end without notice; the change history above records what the nightly re-read confirmed.