For anyone who missed it, Google opened up Gemini 2.5 Flash in AI Studio for free with generous rate limits. You get 15 RPM on the free tier which is honestly enough for personal projects and prototyping. The API is OpenAI-compatible now too, so you can swap it into existing projects with minimal changes. I migrated a side project from GPT-4o-mini and my costs went from $12/month to $0.
Workflows from the Neura Market marketplace related to this Gemini resource