OpenRouter Free Models

Yes. OpenRouter offers select models at zero cost — no API key charges, no hidden fees. Free models are subsidized by OpenRouter and have rate limits (typically 20 requests/minute, 200 requests/day). You do need an OpenRouter account and API key, but there's no credit card required.

Free models on OpenRouter typically have a limit of 20 requests per minute and 200 requests per day. If you hit the limit, you'll get a 429 error. These limits reset daily. For higher throughput, you can add credits to your account or use paid model variants.

Qwen3 Coder 480B (free) is currently the strongest free coding model on OpenRouter, with 262K context and state-of-the-art code generation. DeepSeek R1 (free) is also excellent for reasoning-heavy coding tasks. For lighter tasks, Mistral Small 3.1 and Llama 3.3 70B are solid options.

You can, but it's not recommended for production workloads due to rate limits and potential availability changes. Free models may be removed or have limits adjusted without notice. For production use, add credits to your OpenRouter account and use paid model variants for guaranteed availability.

Sign up at openrouter.ai, get your API key, and use any free model ID (ending in :free) with the OpenRouter API. The API is OpenAI-compatible, so you can use it with any OpenAI SDK by changing the base URL to https://openrouter.ai/api/v1. No credits needed for free models.