Free LLM APIs · checked 2026-10-22
OpenRouter: what “free” actually gets you
OpenRouter is one API in front of hundreds of models from many providers. Models whose id ends in :free cost nothing per token. The limit is shared by every free model on your account, and it depends on whether you have ever bought credits.
- Free allowance
- 50 requests/day (1,000 after a one-time $10)
- Card needed
- No (only to buy credits)
- Trains on prompts
- Depends on the provider serving the model
- Main catch
- One daily limit for all free models together
- Base URL
https://openrouter.ai/api/v1
Limits
- 20 requests per minute on free models.
- 50 requests per day if you have bought less than $10 of credits in total; 1,000 per day once you have bought at least $10. Buying credits raises only the daily limit, not the per-minute one.
- The limit is per account and covers all :free models together: switching models does not give you more.
The fine print
- The company that made a model is often not the one serving its free version. The free endpoint can be served by a different provider with different data rules.
- Free models come and go, sometimes with a published retirement date. Code that hard-codes one free model id will break eventually.
- Free variants can be rate-limited upstream when they are busy (HTTP 429) even when you are under your own limit.
Your data
- OpenRouter publishes, for each provider it routes to, whether that provider may train on prompts and how long it keeps them. On 2026-10-10 four of 93 providers were marked as possibly training: DeepSeek, Liquid, NVIDIA and Thinking Machines.
- You can refuse those providers per request by sending provider.data_collection = "deny". A model only available from such a provider then becomes unavailable to you.
Get started
- Create an account at openrouter.ai and an API key.
- Use base URL https://openrouter.ai/api/v1 with any OpenAI-compatible client.
- Pick a model id ending in :free.
Questions
- How many free requests does OpenRouter give per day?
- 50 per day across all free models, or 1,000 per day once your account has bought at least $10 of credits in total. Both at 20 requests per minute.
- Do OpenRouter's free models train on my prompts?
- OpenRouter itself doesn't say it trains on them, but some of the providers that serve free models may. Send provider.data_collection = "deny" to exclude those providers.
- Do I need a credit card for OpenRouter's free models?
- No for the 50-a-day limit. To get 1,000 a day you need to have bought $10 of credits once.
Sources
Read on 2026-10-22. Providers change limits and terms often; the linked pages are what applies.
Which free models are worth using today, and who serves them: state of free LLM APIs and the open ranking on GitHub. One endpoint across free models, with your own Groq or OpenRouter key if you have one: ZeroLimitAI.