Cohere Trial Key Pricing and Limits Summary for Free Trial

Tadashi Shigeoka ·  Thu, September 11, 2025

This article organizes and explains the pricing structure and usage limitations of Cohere’s Trial key based on official information as of September 2025.

Key Summary: Trial Key is Free

To conclude first, Cohere’s Trial key is completely free to use.

However, since it’s intended for evaluation and trial purposes, several limitations are imposed. For production environment usage, you’ll need a “Production API key” with pay-as-you-go pricing based on token count.

ItemDetails
Usage FeeFree. No charges for Trial key usage.
Limitations (Usage/Calls)Monthly call limits and per-minute call limits (rate limits) are set. Details explained below.
Production keyKey for full-scale usage. Charged based on input/output token count. Pricing varies by model.

Specific Limitations of Trial Key

The free Trial key has the following limitations. For personal development and technical validation, these are often sufficient.

Monthly API Call Limit

You can make up to 1,000 API calls per month across all endpoints (Chat, Embed, Rerank, etc.) combined.

Rate Limits (Calls per Minute)

Each API endpoint has rate limits set for calls per minute.

APILimit
Chat20 calls / minute
Embed (Text)100 calls / minute
Embed (Image)5 calls / minute
Rerank10 calls / minute
Tokenize100 calls / minute
Classify100 calls / minute
Others (legacy Summarize, Generate, etc.)5 calls / minute

Sending large volumes of requests in a short time may hit these limits, so caution is needed especially for batch processing.

Accessible Models

In principle, Trial key can access all models and API endpoints that Cohere provides, same as Production key. There are no functional restrictions, allowing you to freely test features within the usage limit constraints mentioned above.

Summary

Cohere’s Trial key is an extremely valuable resource for developers, allowing you to try the API for free up to 1,000 calls per month. While there are constraints like rate limits, sufficient quota is provided to evaluate Cohere’s powerful Chat, Embed, and Rerank features.

Why not start by creating an account on the official site, obtaining a free Trial key, and experiencing its performance firsthand?

That’s all from the Gemba on starting technical validation with Cohere’s Trial key.

Reference Information