Price terms as published
Each line is the vendor’s own wording, split from the price capture checked on 2026-09-07. Nothing here is rounded, converted or re-worded — the full sentences stay in the review below. Lines that carry only a price continue the plan named on the line above, in the vendor’s own order.
| # | Plan / term | Checked |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Free tier with daily account spend cap | 2026-09-07 |
| 2 | "$10/day" figure is tester-reported, not in official docs | 2026-09-07 |
One-liner: AMD’s Radeon Cloud “Token Factory” (developer.amd.com.cn) hands every registered account an auto-generated API key for a small catalog of open models, served through an OpenAI-compatible endpoint. It is a free channel, funded by AMD’s push to build developer loyalty to its GPUs, and it works from mainland China without a VPN.
Verified facts (checked 2026-09-07)
| Attribute | Value | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Official docs | amd-aim.github.io/radeon-cloud-docs | checked same day |
| Entry point | developer.amd.com.cn/radeon/modelapis | official docs |
| API key | Auto-issued on first visit (rc- + 48 hex), visible in Profile |
official docs (authentication), same day |
| Login methods | Phone/email code, or ModelScope / CSDN / GitHub third-party | official docs (login guide) |
| Rate limits | 30 RPM per key · 120 RPM per IP · 8 concurrent per key | official docs (rate-limits), checked same day |
| Daily cap | Per-account daily spend cap, resets midnight Asia/Shanghai | official docs, same wording |
| Endpoints | OpenAI-compatible /v1/chat/completions and Anthropic-compatible /v1/messages (Claude Code named in docs) |
official docs |
| Error shape | 429 with OpenAI-style body, token_rate_limit_exceeded code, Retry-After header |
official docs |
Independent test record (2026-09-06, registered account)
A collaborator registered and drove the API directly. Findings, kept separate from official claims:
/v1/modelsreturned four live models: DeepSeek-V4-Flash, DeepSeek-V4-Flash-Vision-Exp, Qwen3.8-Flash-Next, MiniCPM5-1B- Chat, vision, and the Anthropic
/v1/messagesendpoint all returned 200 (the vision model correctly identified a color test) - Cold-start first token took 23 seconds; steady-state responses 0.3–1.1 s
- Rapid-fire requests hit
429 token_rate_limit_exceededquickly — real usable throughput is well below the nominal 30 RPM, consistent with the account-level daily cap being reachable by small requests
The widely circulated claim of a “$10 free spend per day” number does not appear in official docs — the docs only say a per-account daily cap exists. Treat $10 as one tester’s measurement, not AMD’s published terms.
Gotchas worth knowing before you build on it
- Silent parameter dropping. The free gateway whitelists parameters; unsupported ones are dropped without error. Your temperature or tool-call config may simply not apply. (official docs — non-whitelisted params silently ignored)
- Chat and Anthropic endpoints only.
embeddings,completions,image,audio,responsesall 404 on the free endpoints. - Small model catalog. Four models, subject to change; this is a showcase, not a marketplace.
- Shared pool. Platform-wide concurrency is a shared resource —
global_concurrency_rate_limit_exceededis a documented failure mode. AMD’s own answer for needing more is a paid dedicated endpoint.
Why this exists (the durable part)
GPU vendors giving away inference is a CUDA-moat counterplay: AMD binds developers to Radeon Cloud the way NVIDIA binds them to CUDA. For users in mainland China specifically, the China-domain entry with ModelScope/CSDN login makes it one of the few big-company, directly-reachable free API channels — no reseller middlemen, no card.
Compare with Keenable (search layer, free 100K req/mo), Cline API (tool-vendor gateway), Agnes AI (model-lab funnel) and ModelScope API-Inference (community-platform pool, 2,000 calls/day) — four different 2026 free-tier shapes: hardware vendor, search infra vendor, model lab, platform community, each giving away a different layer.
Sources
- https://developer.amd.com.cn/radeon/tokenfactory (entry point)
- https://amd-aim.github.io/radeon-cloud-docs/api/rate-limits/ (limits, verified 2026-09-07)
- https://amd-aim.github.io/radeon-cloud-docs/api/overview/ (endpoint scope)
- https://amd-aim.github.io/radeon-cloud-docs/guides/login/ (login methods)
- Independent account test, 2026-09-06 (model catalog, latency, 429 behavior)