What's free
20+ models with a :free suffix, single API across many providers
Rate limits
20 req/min; 50 req/day under 10 credits purchased lifetime, 1000 req/day once 10+ credits purchased (one-time, not a subscription)
The catch
ToS (Apr 2026) prohibits resale or building a competing service on the free models; a private proxy for personal use is fine
Free models · sample
cohere/north-mini-code:freegoogle/gemma-4-26b-a4b-it:freegoogle/gemma-4-31b-it:freeinclusionai/ling-3.0-flash:freenvidia/nemotron-3-nano-30b-a3b:freenvidia/nemotron-3-nano-omni-30b-a3b-reasoning:freeopenai/gpt-oss-20b:freepoolside/laguna-s-2.1:freeA sample of models reachable on the free tier — the live catalog changes. Pull the current set with GET https://openrouter.ai/api/v1/models.
Quickstart — chat completions
from openai import OpenAI
client = OpenAI(base_url="https://openrouter.ai/api/v1", api_key="<YOUR_FREE_API_KEY>")
resp = client.chat.completions.create(
model="cohere/north-mini-code:free",
messages=[{"role": "user", "content": "Hello!"}],
)
print(resp.choices[0].message.content)…or with curl:
curl https://openrouter.ai/api/v1/chat/completions \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $API_KEY" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{"model":"cohere/north-mini-code:free","messages":[{"role":"user","content":"Hello!"}]}'