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OpenRouter (free models) free tier

🧭 Aggregators (one key, many providers) · no card · live — last verified by a probe on 2026-11-01 · openrouter.ai · back to the whole list

What you get

One API key for a rotating set of :free model variants, open-weight and stealth models among them

Free models

nemotron-3-ultra, gemma-4-31b, gemma-4-26b-a4b, north-mini-code, nemotron-3.5-lightning, inkling, inkling-small, dots-3-note, nemotron-3-nano-omni, nemotron-3.5-super-vl-120b-a12b, xing4.0-29b-a4b

Limits, in the vendor’s words

50 requests/day; 20 requests/minute per account

1,000 requests/day per account (after 10 credits purchased all-time)

OpenRouter’s FAQ says its free models “have low rate limits” and “are usually not suitable for production use”, and its limits page warns that a negative credit balance can produce errors “including for free models” and that a 429 can come from the upstream provider rather than the platform (read 2026-09-27). The docs define the daily counter as “Free-model requests recorded so far in the current UTC day”. The higher daily ceiling is granted “starting one credit below the table’s threshold” to absorb rounding and top-up fees.

Where it is offered

The vendor names no country it keeps the offer from (source, read 2026-09-26).

What happens to what you send

What you send may be used to train or improve models unless you turn that off. In the vendor’s words: “Wherever possible, OpenRouter works with providers to ensure that prompts will not be trained on, but there are exceptions. If you opt out of training in your account settings, OpenRouter will not route to providers that train.” (source).

Connect

Try it from your terminal with your key in OPENROUTER_API_KEY — it goes from your machine to the vendor and nowhere else:

curl -s https://openrouter.ai/api/v1/chat/completions \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $OPENROUTER_API_KEY" \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{"model":"nvidia/nemotron-3-ultra-550b-a55b:free","messages":[{"role":"user","content":"2+2? MAKE NO MISTAKES."}]}'

Evidence

History

Each line is a change to what this page publishes, dated the day it reached the list, in UTC.

Generated from registry.yaml on 2026-11-01 and re-verified twice a week; the full list, the Atom feed and the machinery are at https://github.com/mvalentsev/awesome-free-ai-coding.

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