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OrcaRouter (free models) free tier

🧭 Aggregators (one key, many providers) · no card · provisional — added on 2026-11-08, a regular row from the first probe it passes on or after 2026-11-22 · live — last verified by a probe on 2026-11-12 · orcarouter.ai · back to the whole list

What you get

Free model APIs for accounts with established GitHub linkage

Free models

No free model family is currently listed here; callable ids, where the row has them, are under Connect.

Limits, in the vendor’s words

10 requests/minute; 50 requests/day per workspace (before any top-up)

20 requests/minute; 800 requests/day per workspace ($20 lifetime spend)

The workspace owner must link a GitHub account registered for some time, unless lifetime spend exempts the workspace. The lowest tier also has a small unpublished per-request prompt cap. Day buckets reset at 00:00 UTC. Free models never fall back to a paid model; availability and limits can change. Requests are routed to upstream providers under their own policies. The rate-limit guide states “OrcaRouter rate-limits at the workspace level, not per API key.”

Where it is offered

The vendor names no country it keeps the offer from (source, read 2026-11-08).

Connect

Base URL: https://api.orcarouter.ai/v1
Key: ORCAROUTER_API_KEY — get one at https://www.orcarouter.ai
Callable ids: deepseek/deepseek-v4-flash-free, deepseek/deepseek-v4.1-flash-free, z-ai/glm-5.3-flash-free
Note: Create an OrcaRouter key and keep the exact -free ID. The listed variants declare Chat Completions in the public catalog. Paid siblings and the separately gated Security Research models have different access conditions. Read the error reason: rate windows, capacity, prompt size and GitHub eligibility are different failures.

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

curl -s https://api.orcarouter.ai/v1/chat/completions \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $ORCAROUTER_API_KEY" \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{"model":"deepseek/deepseek-v4-flash-free","messages":[{"role":"user","content":"2+2? MAKE NO MISTAKES."}]}'

Evidence

Probe: the models catalog at https://api.orcarouter.ai/v1/models, free rows carrying -free, each listed family checked for a zero price
Source: https://docs.orcarouter.ai/routing/free-models.md
Source: https://api.orcarouter.ai/api/free-package/public
Source: https://docs.orcarouter.ai/getting-started/quickstart.md
Source: https://www.orcarouter.ai/terms.html
Source: https://www.orcarouter.ai/privacy.html
Source: https://docs.orcarouter.ai/operations/rate-limits.md

History

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

2026-11-08 — Added: Free model APIs for accounts with established GitHub linkage

Generated from registry.yaml on 2026-11-12 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.

Something wrong or missing? Suggest a service or a change — or read how the list works.