Fresh paint, wet floors — we're rebuilding CostOfToken into a cross-provider price comparison. Some corners are still under construction; the full version is coming up soon.

Where models are free right now

Free API routes we can verify today, mostly OpenRouter's rotating:freeroster. A model that is not listed has no production free API we know of — the frontier commercial models (Claude, GPT, Gemini Pro) almost never do. For those, the honest answer is the cheapest paid route on the model's own page.

Free routes are rate-limited, rotate without notice, and can differ from the paid door in context, tools and caching. Prices and rosters move — always confirm with the provider before depending on one.

ModelFree doorContextLast checkedPaid fallback
Google: Gemma 4 26B A4B OpenRouter google/gemma-4-26b-a4b-it:free262K2026-11-10OpenRouter $0.080 / $0.100 per 1M
Google: Gemma 4 31BOpenRouter google/gemma-4-31b-it:free262K2026-11-10DeepInfra $0.200 / $0.400 per 1M
NVIDIA: Nemotron 3 Nano Omni (free)OpenRouter nvidia/nemotron-3-nano-omni-30b-a3b-reasoning:free256K2026-11-10—
NVIDIA: Nemotron 3 UltraOpenRouter nvidia/nemotron-3-ultra-550b-a55b:free1M2026-11-10OpenRouter $0.600 / $2.40 per 1M
NVIDIA: Nemotron 3.5 LightningOpenRouter nvidia/nemotron-3.5-lightning:free1M2026-11-10OpenRouter $0.070 / $0.200 per 1M
NVIDIA: Nemotron 3.5 Super VLOpenRouter nvidia/nemotron-3.5-super-vl:free1M2026-11-10OpenRouter $0.150 / $0.470 per 1M
Cohere: North Mini Code (free)OpenRouter cohere/north-mini-code:free256K2026-11-10—
liquid/lfm-2.5-2.6b:freeOpenRouter liquid/lfm-2.5-2.6b:free66K2026-11-10—
dots-studio/dots-3-note-preview:freeOpenRouter dots-studio/dots-3-note-preview:free512K2026-11-10—
xingchen-agi/xing4.0-29b-a4b:freeOpenRouter xingchen-agi/xing4.0-29b-a4b:free262K2026-11-10—
thinkingmachines/inkling-2-small:freeOpenRouter thinkingmachines/inkling-2-small:free1M2026-11-10—
recursive/flint-v1.0:freeOpenRouter recursive/flint-v1.0:free262K2026-11-10—
liquid/lfm-3-1.7b:freeOpenRouter liquid/lfm-3-1.7b:free262K2026-11-10—