Pollinations.AI

Pollinations.AI is an open-source generative AI platform built by Myceli AI OÜ and based in Berlin, offering a single unified API for text, image, audio, and video generation. The platform is MIT-licensed, community-driven, and reports 10K weekly active developers and 1.5M daily requests across 500+ live apps, according to the homepage.

What It Is

Pollinations.AI is a developer-facing AI infrastructure platform that abstracts away model hosting and GPU management so builders can focus on their applications. The core offering is a unified REST API at gen.pollinations.ai that routes requests to a wide range of models — including Flux, GPT-5, Claude, Gemini, Seedream, and others — for image, text, audio, and video generation. The platform is fully open source under the MIT license, with code, decisions, and roadmap all public on GitHub.

Unified API and Model Access

The platform consolidates multiple generation modalities under one endpoint:

• Image generation — Flux, GPT Image, Seedream, Kontext models
• Video generation — Seedance, Veo (alpha), Wan-Fast with keyframe support
• Audio — Text-to-speech (OpenAI TTS-compatible, 30+ ElevenLabs voices) and speech-to-text with speaker diarization
• Text — Streaming, tool use, structured output, vision, search, and embeddings
• OpenAI-compatible endpoints — drop-in replacement for existing OpenAI integrations

Authentication uses publishable keys (pk_) for client-side use and secret keys (sk_) for server-side, with per-key model scoping available.

Developer Tooling and Ecosystem

Beyond the HTTP API, Pollinations ships several integration surfaces:

• polli CLI — installable via npx @pollinations_ai/cli, supports text, image, audio, and video generation with --json output and stdin context for agent pipelines
• Node.js/browser/React SDK — available as an npm package
• MCP server — npx @pollinations_ai/mcp lets AI assistants like Claude generate images and audio directly via the Model Context Protocol
• Pollen credits — a pay-as-you-go credit system ($1 ≈ 1 Pollen) with a "Bring Your Own Pollen" model where users pay from their own wallets, enabling developers to build apps at zero infrastructure cost

Architecture and Infrastructure

The platform runs on a layered architecture: a Cloudflare Worker at gen.pollinations.ai handles API routing and auth, passing requests to an enter.pollinations.ai gateway that dispatches to specialized image and audio services on EC2, GPU VMs for image models, and third-party APIs (ElevenLabs, Scaleway, Deepseek, Azure-hosted LLMs, Cloudflare AI). Image results are cached via Cloudflare Workers and R2 storage. The GitHub README lists infrastructure supporters including AWS Activate, Google Cloud for Startups, NVIDIA Inception, Azure (MS for Startups), Cloudflare, Scaleway, Modal, and Nebius.

Update: Unified API Launch and May 2026 Releases

The platform recently launched gen.pollinations.ai as its new unified endpoint, replacing the older per-modality URLs. Notable recent additions as of May 2026 include:

• Gemini 3.5 Flash (2026-05-19) — live on the text endpoint with reasoning and tool use
• GPT-5.4-Mini (2026-05-15) — available on the free tier with text, images, tools, and streaming
• Uncapped generations (2026-05-18) — removed artificial timeouts on text and image endpoints
• Keyframe video generation (2026-05-17) — pass start/end images to generate transitions across Seedance, Veo, and Wan-Fast
• Speaker diarization (2026-05-17) — /v1/audio/transcriptions now returns structured JSON with speaker IDs and timestamps

The repository shows 4,523 GitHub stars and was last updated on 2026-05-20, indicating active development momentum.

Community and Open-Source Model

The platform explicitly positions itself as community-shaped: developers can submit apps to a public "Greenhouse" directory, contribute via GitHub issues (with a MentatBot AI assistant that can implement requested features), and earn Pollen credits through quests and activity. The Discord community is the primary support channel. Upcoming roadmap items listed on the homepage include Pollinations Login (drop-in auth), App Hosting, App Discovery, and an Ads SDK for developer earnings.