awesome-free-ai-coding

OpenRouter (free models)

🧭 Aggregators (one key, many providers) · no card · live — last verified by a probe on 2026-09-17 · 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

Limits, in the vendor’s words

20 requests per minute on any :free id, 50 requests per day, and 1,000 per day once the account has purchased at least 10 credits all-time. Those four figures are in the page only as JS constants — FREE_MODEL_RATE_LIMIT_RPM, FREE_MODEL_NO_CREDITS_RPD, FREE_MODEL_HAS_CREDITS_RPD and FREE_MODEL_CREDITS_THRESHOLD — and the table that should show them serves empty cells to anything reading the HTML. OpenRouter’s FAQ says its free models “have low rate limits” and “are usually not suitable for production use”, warns that a negative credit balance can produce errors “including for free models”, and notes a 429 may come from the upstream provider rather than the platform (read 2026-08-14)

Connect

Base URL: https://openrouter.ai/api/v1
Key: OPENROUTER_API_KEY — get one at https://openrouter.ai/settings/keys
Anthropic-format base (Claude Code’s ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL): https://openrouter.ai/api
Callable ids: nvidia/nemotron-3-ultra-550b-a55b:free, nvidia/nemotron-3-super-120b-a12b:free, nvidia/nemotron-3.5-lightning:free, nvidia/nemotron-3-nano-omni-30b-a3b-reasoning:free, nvidia/nemotron-3.5-content-safety:free, google/gemma-4-31b-it:free, google/gemma-4-26b-a4b-it:free, cohere/north-mini-code:free, poolside/laguna-s-2.1:free, poolside/laguna-xs-2.1:free, thinkingmachines/inkling:free, thinkingmachines/inkling-small:free, dots-studio/dots-3-note-preview:free, inclusionai/ling-3.0-flash-fin:free, inclusionai/ling-3.0-flash-sante:free, liquid/lfm-2.5-2.6b:free, inclusionai/ling-3.0-flash-vl:free, nex-agi/nex-n2.5-pro:free, nex-agi/nex-n2.5-mini:free, z-ai/glm-5.2:free, openrouter/free
Note: pick models with the :free suffix: every id carrying it is priced 0/0, twenty on 2026-09-16, and the lane rotates, so a new id waits two weeks for the Models column. Six are not coding models: openrouter/free is the free-models router, nemotron-3.5-content-safety a guardrail, ling-3.0-flash-fin and ling-3.0-flash-sante finance- and health-tuned, nemotron-3-nano-omni a perception sub-agent, and LiquidAI warns lfm-2.5-2.6b off agentic coding. For Claude Code, OpenRouter’s cookbook sets ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL to https://openrouter.ai/api with ANTHROPIC_API_KEY empty and a :free id as ANTHROPIC_MODEL

Evidence

Probe: the models catalog at https://openrouter.ai/api/v1/models, free rows carrying :free, every listed family required at a zero price
Source: https://openrouter.ai/docs/faq
Source: https://openrouter.ai/docs/api_reference/limits
Source: https://openrouter.ai/docs/cookbook/coding-agents/claude-code-integration

History

2026-08-27 — Free models changed: dropped gpt-oss
2026-07-19 — Free models changed: added gemma-4, gpt-oss, nemotron-3-ultra; dropped deepseek, glm-4.5, kimi-k2, qwen3-coder
2026-07-19 — Added to the list: One API key for rotating :free variants of frontier models

Generated from registry.yaml on 2026-09-18 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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