About
AI inference is getting cheaper. We think a lot of it can be free.
Open models from Alibaba, Meta, Google, DeepSeek, NVIDIA and others are offered free by several providers, and the best of them are good enough for a large share of real work: coding assistants, support bots, summaries, classification, drafts.
What stops people from building on them is not quality. It is that the landscape moves every week: models appear and vanish, free tiers rate-limit, a provider has a bad afternoon. Keeping up is a job in itself.
ZeroLimitAI does that job. One OpenAI-compatible endpoint, and a full chat app on the same routing, that always sends your request to the best free model answering right now. You change two lines of code and stop running a per-token meter.
How it works
01
Rank
Every 24 hours ZeroOptimize™ scores every free model it can reach: public benchmarks, context window, capabilities, provider reliability. The result is one ordered list.
02
Check
A daily probe, plus every real request, records which models are answering. A model that fails is set aside for a while and retried later; one that has been withdrawn is dropped.
03
Route
A request goes to the best model that is healthy right now. If it rate-limits or errors, the same request falls through to the next one. You get a slower answer, not an error.
04
Show
The response says which model answered. The chain is public on the homepage, the leaderboard and the status page, all read from the same ranking the router uses.
How $99 once can work
Subscriptions exist because the vendor pays per token and has to pass it on. We do not pay per token: we only route to free models, so a customer who uses the service heavily costs us about the same as one who barely touches it. What the price covers is the routing, the infrastructure and the app.
That is also why the limits are what they are. Lifetime includes 10,000 API calls a day and is meant for you and your team. Larger volumes, or serving your own customers at scale, go through a Business agreement invoiced by volume.
What we hold ourselves to
Free models only
Inference must cost $0. No paid model sits in any chain, not even as a last resort. Plans differ in limits and features, never in model quality.
Say when we are the wrong choice
If your product depends on one specific paid frontier model, or needs embeddings today, use a paid API. We say so on the homepage, because the rest is only believable if that is.
Your data is not the product
We do not train on your requests or conversations and we do not sell them. Requests are forwarded to the provider of the model that answers; those providers are listed.
Checkable by default
The model rankings are a public repository. The routing chain and its health are live pages. The API has an OpenAPI spec. The changelog says what shipped.
Check it yourself
Everything above can be opened and verified.
Who is behind it
ZeroLimitAI is built and run by a small independent team. The same people maintain the public free-model list on GitHub, answer support, and read every reply to our emails. If something is wrong, unclear or missing, write to us: a person answers.
Try the endpoint
Free API key: 100 calls a day for a week, then 50 a day forever. No card.