Pollinations...

have you heard of this site?

its called pollinations.ai and it used to be the best free ai provider. but, bad update after bad update caused it to go from free to heavily paid.

Pollen

this probably all started with this one single update.

its a credits system where each request costs pollen, and if you don't have enough pollen, the request wont go through.

you got more pollen/hour if your tier is higher.

this sounds good on paper, and it was. the tier were very generous, and you could still use the old system if you wanted to. and then they got rid of the old system fully. and then they nerfed the tiers. a lot. completely getting rid of the highest tier0, and making the now-highest tier, flower, only 0.4 pollen per hour. they even added a new lowest tier, named spore, with even less pollen per hour.

"but why not just wait 2 hours for 0.8 pollen??"

the tier balance just gets refilled. it doesn't get added on. that means that if you had 0.4 pollen, you wouldn't get another 0.4, it would just reset.

they also had paid pollen, which was good, like yes let them make money, but then they got a bit too greedy...

Paid-pollen-only models

they made it so certain models could only be used with paid balance. yes, they need to make money, but up until this point, the entire api was free.

and then they made already free models paid. and then more. and then more.

leading to almost 50% being paid only.

yellow = paid, green = free

these are the number of images per 1 pollen you can make for the first 10 models listed.

they have text also, which is better, but image gen is literally the first thing selected on the model list...

out of 105 models, 48 of them are paid-only. that's almost half. for a platform that was used to be fully free..

Conclusion

with more updates, like making the tiers one time bonuses instead of hourly refills, and an ads sdk, pollinations is now a paid platform like openrouter.

pollinations used to be a free platform that let developers experiment with ai.

now its 50% paid, and the other 50% is almost all text models. what if you want image generation? video generation? tts? almost all paid.

that's all i have to say about this for now. thanks for reading :)