About
AI inference is getting cheaper. We think a lot of it can be free.
Open models from Google and other labs 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, LM Arena votes, context window, capabilities, provider reliability. The result is one ordered list, public at /leaderboard.
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 A model that fails is set aside for a while and retried later; one that has been withdrawn is dropped.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.
Why a yearly price, and what happened to Lifetime
Per-token vendors pass every token on to you. We mostly route to free models, so a heavy user costs us far less than on a paid API, but not nothing: free providers cap how many requests we can send each day, that capacity is shared by every account, and when it runs out we pay for a paid model so your request still gets an answer. A yearly price is what lets us pay for that backup.
That is why Lifetime is no longer sold (since 26 October 2026). It promised a fixed amount of free-model capacity for good, and that capacity is not ours to guarantee. Accounts that bought it keep everything they bought. Today the plans are Chat ($19 a year: the app without the API) and Annual ($99 a year, $59 in Latin America: the app plus 2,000 API calls a day, with the paid backup). Need more? Add your own free Groq or OpenRouter key, or write to hello@zerolimitai.com.
What we hold ourselves to
Free models first, and you never pay per token
Every request goes to the best free model first. On Annual, when the free models are busy or the shared free allowance is used up, a paid model answers at our cost, within a monthly fair-use allowance; beyond it, your own free key takes over. Plans differ in limits and features, never in which model gets your request first.
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 only to providers that don't train on prompts; a provider may still retain a prompt for a while under its own terms. 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 for 7 days: 25 calls a day, no card. Then $99 a year.