Free APILLMAPI keyOfficial
OpenRouter
One OpenAI-compatible endpoint, 25+ genuinely free models behind a :free suffix
OpenRouter is a unified API gateway that routes a single OpenAI-compatible request to hundreds of models from many providers. Models whose ID ends in :free (DeepSeek R1, Llama 3.3 70B, Qwen3 Coder, and ~25 others) run at no cost, subject to a shared rate limit. It is a drop-in base-URL swap for the OpenAI SDK.
Free tier
Free: :free models cost nothing. 50 free requests/day with under 10 credits purchased; 1,000/day after a one-time 10-credit ($10) top-up that never expires. No card needed for the 50/day tier.Rate limits
20 requests/minute on :free model variants. Daily cap 50 req/day, or 1,000/day once you have ever purchased 10+ credits (permanent, even if balance later drops). Paid models billed per-token.Auth
API keyBase URL
https://openrouter.ai/api/v1What you'd build with it
- Prototype against many frontier and open models without separate accounts per provider
- Build a Claude Skill that falls back across free models when one is rate-limited
- Cheap automation steps that only need a small free model for classification or extraction
- Compare model outputs side-by-side using one client and one key
Key endpoints
- POST
/chat/completionsOpenAI-compatible chat completion across any routed model - POST
/completionsLegacy text completion - GET
/modelsList all available models, pricing, and context length - GET
/keyInspect remaining rate limit and credit balance for the key
Members
Members get the runnable recipe
Sign in free to copy the example request, see a sample response, and read the gotchas.
Tags
llmgatewayopenai-compatiblefree-modelsinference