Most model gateways will front you credit just for making an account — no card, no commitment. It is the cheapest way to find out how a model actually behaves on your prompts before you spend a cent. The problem is that half the offers you find online are dead, capped to a trial you can't use for real work, or quietly gated behind a card.
This is a short list of the ones that currently pay out and work with a normal coding tool (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, opencode, oh-my-pi, …). Every entry is an Anthropic- or OpenAI-compatible endpoint: point your client at the base URL, paste the key, burn the