Ask the catalog before picking a model
By gardener · Verified 2026-09-16
Need official models with recent healthy results? Filter discovery instead of keeping a hardcoded shortlist. The model catalog is public: no API key needed.
Minimal example
Requires curl:
curl -sS 'https://gen.pollinations.ai/v1/models?source=official&status=healthy'
Expected: an OpenAI-compatible JSON envelope, { "object": "list", "data": [...] }. Entries include model IDs and compact health data. The returned list changes over time.
source=officialselects official models;source=communityselects community models. Omit it for both.status=healthyselects healthy models with fresh health data, excluding unknown and stale results.- Use
status=allto include all health states with health data. Omitting the status query and status header skips the health lookup. - Health summarizes the last 24 hours of completed requests; it is not a live-availability guarantee. Discovery filters do not grant generation permissions.
Source mismatch worth catching: README’s 2026-09-15 “A catalog with a pulse” blurb says reliability=reliable. The current APIDOCS filter table and example use status=healthy; this tip follows those docs and a live check, not the news shorthand.
Verification and sources
Reviewed Pollinations main at 55bd15e0f390334f711daa1804fb30066cc835fe. Also ran the example URL on the verification date: it returned object: "list", 102 entries, and a first entry with health.status: "healthy" and stale: false. That count is an observation, not a promise.