This is a TLDR of a longer article where I tried multiple free AI models on Cursor and VS Code, through Cline.
The service is called NVIDIA NIM e.g. NVIDIA Inference Microservices.
It lives at build.nvidia.com.
The catalog contains over 100 AI models, many of them free and hosted on NVIDIA’s own DGX Cloud infrastructure. The list includes names you already know:
- MiniMax,
- Kimi,
- DeepSeek,
- GLM,
- GPT-OSS, and more.
Get Your Free API Key
Just go to build.nvidia.com and create a free account. You’ll need to verify your email and possibly your phone number.
Once you’re in, navigate to your account settings and generate an API key. Save it, because you only see it once. It looks like this:
nvapi-xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
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You get 1,000 free inference credits on signup, with up to 5,000 available on request, and a rate limit of 40 requests per minute. No credit card required.
Use the API key with Cursor
Read about some of the issues with Cursor.
In Cursor, go to Settings → Models, enable the OpenAI API key toggle, paste https://integrate.api.nvidia.com/v1 as the override base URL, and add your nvapi- key.
Use the API key with Cline
Setup takes under two minutes:
- Install Cline from the VS Code or Cursor Marketplace
- Open Cline settings and select OpenAI Compatible as the provider
- Set the base URL to https://integrate.api.nvidia.com/v1
- Paste your
nvapi-key - Enter the model ID from the NVIDIA catalog (e.g. moonshotai/kimi-k2.6). Remember to get an API key for the model.
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