OpenRouter free tier includes AI model router. Free plan: 50 requests a day, no BYOK… Verified November 2026. Compare with 27 alternatives in AI / ML.

OpenRouter Free Tier 2026

stable

Subtypes in AI / ML: model_gateway — one endpoint that reaches models run by several independent providers; what is sold is the routing, key management and fallback, not the weights. We read that on 2026-09-01 from https://openrouter.ai/pricing, where it says: “Pay only for what you use with access to 500+ AI models” How we use this.

Limits, pricing history, and 27 alternatives. Verified November 2026. Last updated 2026-11-06.

OpenRouter's free tier offers AI model router. Free plan: 50 requests a day, no BYOK… We rate it stable. The one record we hold was our own error and has been withdrawn. Best for ai / ml workloads — 27 alternatives available.

One of 89 AI / ML services we track. See our full AI / ML Free Tier Comparison →

Tier

Free

Free Tier Details

AI model router. Free plan: 50 requests a day, no BYOK. Free models are capped at 20 requests a minute; accounts that have bought at least $10 of credits get 1,000 free-model requests a day. OpenRouter's pricing page says "25+ free models" and "4 free providers"; its model list (openrouter.ai/api/v1/models) had 17 model IDs ending in ":free" on 2026-10-20, and that list changes from week to week. The Standard plan (pay-as-you-go) charges a 5.5% fee on credit purchases and includes BYOK up to $25,000 of list-price inference a month with no fees, 5% after. The Business plan charges an 8% fee on credit purchases. It adds EU and US in-region routing: requests sent to eu.openrouter.ai or us.openrouter.ai stay with providers in that region. Free and Standard do not include in-region routing. No contract or sales call is needed. On 2026-08-19 OpenRouter announced it is joining Stripe. OpenRouter says it will continue to operate as it is, with the same name, product and roadmap, and that existing integrations do not change.

We read that on 2026-11-06 from https://openrouter.ai/pricing, and our check recorded: the page names OpenRouter as "openrouter" and states "$25,000" and "$10" and "50 requests/day" and "25,000 of list price inference / month".

OpenRouter's free models need no credit card. (From openrouter.ai/blog/tutorials/free-llm-apis-compared, read 2026-10-22.)
A request over a free-model limit gets a 429 error with the message "Rate limit exceeded". The daily limit counts by UTC day. (From openrouter.ai/docs/api-reference/limits, read 2026-10-29.)
The paid variant of a model has no platform-level request cap. (From openrouter.ai/docs/api-reference/limits, read 2026-10-29.)
With a negative credit balance, requests can fail, including for free models; adding credits to bring the balance above zero restores access. (From openrouter.ai/docs/api-reference/limits, read 2026-10-29.)
OpenRouter does not store your prompts or responses unless you opt in to Private Input & Output Logging or OpenRouter Use of Inputs/Outputs, or content is flagged as potential CSAM. Both opt-ins are off by default. OpenRouter Use of Inputs/Outputs lets OpenRouter use prompt and completion data to improve the product, for a 1% discount on model usage. OpenRouter stores request metadata without prompt or response content. (From openrouter.ai/docs/guides/privacy/data-collection, read 2026-10-30.)
Each provider has its own data handling policies. OpenRouter works with providers so that prompts are not trained on wherever possible, but there are exceptions. Account settings control routing to providers that may train on your data, separately for paid and free models. If you opt out of training, OpenRouter will not route to those providers. (From openrouter.ai/docs/guides/privacy/provider-logging, read 2026-10-30.)

When You'll Outgrow OpenRouter's Free Tier

At 50 requests/day, you'll need to upgrade.
At that point, the 27 alternatives in AI / ML are each listed with the free tier they offer, so you can compare what they give you against what you have outgrown.

Pricing Change History (1 recorded)

reduced discovered 2026-09-07 · effective date unknown medium impact

Retracted — this record was our error (2026-09-28). Retracted 2026-09-28: OpenRouter did not narrow its free tier on 2026-09-07. Its rate-limits documentation has capped free-model use at 20 requests a minute and 50 a day since April 2025: the 2025-04-08 archive capture says "you can make up to 20 requests per minute. If your account has less than 10 credits, you're limited to 50 requests per day", and the 2026-02-22 and 2026-09-01 captures state the same limits. The pricing page listed the Free plan as "25+ free models", "4 free providers" and "Rate limits 50 reqs/day" on the 2025-10-31, 2026-02-24 and 2026-09-06 captures. The $25,000 allowance is the Pay-as-you-go plan's bring-your-own-key allowance; the Free plan has none. The record compared the page with our earlier description, which had left out the daily cap. Source ↗

View all 513 pricing changes across all vendors →

Alternatives in AI / ML

How OpenRouter compares against every one of the 27 we list, not against a selection of them. A surface with room for every member of a tied set may rotate their order. A surface with room for only some of them names none of them, because which ones it named would be the claim, and a claim seeded on the date is not the one we serve tomorrow. How we decide this.

Service	Free Tier	Stability
OpenRouter	Free	stable
NVIDIA NIM	Free Free inference endpoints on build.nvidia.com: models marked Free Endpoint, including DeepSeek V4.1 Flash, GLM 5.3 Flash, gpt-oss-20b, Gemma 4 31B and NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Ultra, can be called at no cost. Their model IDs are deepseek-ai/deepseek-v4.1-flash, z-ai/glm-5.3-flash, openai/gpt-oss-20b,…	stable
Maxim AI	Free Simulate, evaluate, and observe your AI agents — The 'OSS' tier is free forever for developers, small teams, and self-managed deployments. It includes features like a drop-in replacement, OTel compatibility, metrics & traces, built-in observability, budget management, and more.	stable
Groq	Free Fast LLM inference on Groq's LPU hardware. Free plan: gpt-oss-20b, gpt-oss-120b and Qwen3.8 27B, each at 30 requests a minute, 1,000 requests and 200,000 tokens a day, plus Whisper speech-to-text at 2,000 requests a day.	caution
Keywords AI	Free Rebranded to Respan; keywordsai.co redirects to respan.ai. Free plan: full platform, 100k logs, 1k scores, 5 datasets, 2 evaluators, 5 prompts.	source unconfirmed
LLM7.io	Free LLM inference gateway. With a free token from dash.llm7.io: 1 request a second, 60 a minute, 250 an hour and 100,000 tokens per 24 hours, counting input and output tokens; LLM7 says free quotas may be reduced without notice.	caution
Hetzner Inference API	Free Hetzner's experimental Inference API: an OpenAI-compatible API for open-weight models, free while it stays experimental. Base URL: https://inference.hetzner.com/api/v1.	stable
Cohere	Free AI model API for Command chat models, Embed, Rerank, Transcribe and Parse. Every account starts with a Trial API key: calls made with it are free and limited to 1,000 API calls a month.	stable
Google Gemini API	Free (Reduced) Free tier: Gemini 4 Hydrogen, Gemini 3.8 Flash, 3.6 Flash, 3.5 Flash-Lite, 3.1 Flash-Lite, Gemini 3 Flash Preview, Gemini Embedding 2 and Gemma 4 are free of charge. Also free of charge are Gemini 3.8 Live (real-time voice), Gemini 3.5 Live Translate (translation), Gemini 3.5 Transcribe…	stable
Cloudflare Workers AI	Free Workers AI runs AI models on Cloudflare's global network. Every account gets 10,000 Neurons per day at no charge, reset daily at 00:00 UTC; on the Workers Free plan, requests beyond that fail until the reset.	caution
Pollinations.AI	Free Keyless Classic API: one image model and GPT-OSS 20B text, free, no sign-up, rate-limited per IP. Every other model needs an API key and Pollen, and free Pollen comes only from quests.	caution
Lumenfall.ai	Free AI media gateway: one OpenAI-compatible API to image and video generation models from several providers, billed at each provider's price with no markup, platform fee or subscription. One model, FLUX.1 [schnell] FP8, is listed free per image ("Free to try", served through Fireworks AI).	stable
Hugging Face	Free ML model hub. Since 2026-10-07, free accounts get no included Inference Providers credits: free users buy credits or upgrade to PRO to call Inference Providers, which serves 200+ models.	caution
Portkey	Free Control panel for Gen AI apps featuring an observability suite & an AI gateway. Send & log up to 10,000 requests for free every month.	unrated
SiliconFlow	Free Pay-as-you-go model inference. siliconflow.cn, run by a Beijing company, lists these models at no charge: the chat models Qwen3-8B, Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct (Free), Qwen3.5-4B, GLM-4-9B-0414, GLM-Z1-9B-0414, DeepSeek-R1-0528-Qwen3-8B (Free) and Xing4.0-29B; the translation model Hunyuan-MT-7B; the OCR…	unrated
Zhipu AI	Free China-based GLM model API. The price list marks these models free: GLM-4.7-Flash, GLM-4-Flash-250414 and GLM-Z1-Flash (text); GLM-4.6V-Flash, GLM-4V-Flash and GLM-4.1V-Thinking-Flash (vision); CogView-3-Flash (image); CogVideoX-Flash (video).	source unconfirmed
Fireworks AI	Free Credits Inference platform for open models, with serverless per-token pricing and on-demand GPU deployments billed per GPU second. Fireworks offers $1 in free credits to get started.	unrated
Baseten	Basic (Free Credits) ML model deployment platform. New workspaces receive credits for testing and deployment; Baseten does not state the amount.	unrated
Cerebras	Trial Ultra-fast LLM inference API — no permanent free tier. New accounts get $5 in free credits after adding a verified payment method, expiring 30 days after they are granted.	risky
Anthropic API	Pay-as-you-go Claude API with usage-based pricing per million tokens (input/output). Claude Fable 5.2 $8/$40.	unrated
Mistral AI	Pay-as-you-go Since about 2026-11-05, Mistral's Free plan covers Vibe and Studio and does not include API access. Creating API keys and calling the API require billing activation and pay-as-you-go with prepaid credits.	unrated
GitHub Models	Retired GitHub retired GitHub Models on 2026-07-30, so there is no free tier. GitHub's own documentation states "GitHub Models has been retired."	source unconfirmed
Together AI	Pay-as-you-go Inference API for open-source models, billed per token. Together AI does not currently offer free trials; access requires a minimum $15 credit purchase for an organization's first purchase ($5 for later purchases), and the platform is fully prepaid.	unrated
OpenAI	Pay-as-you-go AI API platform. One model is priced Free in OpenAI's own table: the moderation model omni-moderation-latest.	unrated
Ollama Cloud	Pay-as-you-go Cloud-hosted Ollama for running open-source LLMs. Between October 26 and 27, 2026, Ollama replaced its Free plan, which included starter usage credits, with a $0 Pay as you go plan.	unrated
xAI	Pay-as-you-go Grok API, pay as you go: sign up at console.x.ai, then load it with credits. grok-4.7 $2.00/$6.00 (per 1M tokens, under 200k prompt tokens).	unrated
DeepSeek API	Pay-as-you-go Pay-as-you-go LLM API with no free tier, billed from a prepaid balance. DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash (deepseek-flash): $0.30/M input, $1.20/M output at peak.	unrated
MiniMax	Pay-as-you-go MiniMax sells API access pay-as-you-go on platform.minimax.io. Its pricing pages list no free API allowance; one docs page mentions a free quota for new pay-as-you-go users but gives no amount.	unrated

Left out of this list: Brave Search API (shares no subtype with this product), Pinecone (shares no subtype with this product), Qdrant (shares no subtype with this product), Deepgram (shares no subtype with this product), Kaggle (shares no subtype with this product), Roboflow (shares no subtype with this product), Scale AI (shares no subtype with this product), AssemblyAI (shares no subtype with this product), Replicate (shares no subtype with this product), Weights & Biases (shares no subtype with this product), Comet ML (shares no subtype with this product), Clarifai (we have not classified this record), Neptune.ai (we have not classified this record), Labelbox (shares no subtype with this product), Google Colab (shares no subtype with this product), Composio (shares no subtype with this product), DeepAR (none of this category's subtypes apply), OCR.Space (shares no subtype with this product), Parseur (shares no subtype with this product), Reducto (shares no subtype with this product), SerpApi (shares no subtype with this product), Tavily AI (shares no subtype with this product), paperspace (shares no subtype with this product), Arize AX (shares no subtype with this product), Audio Enhancer (none of this category's subtypes apply), Braintrust (shares no subtype with this product), Clair (none of this category's subtypes apply), Langfuse (shares no subtype with this product), LangSmith (shares no subtype with this product), Langtrace (we have not classified this record), LangWatch (shares no subtype with this product), Mediaworkbench.ai (none of this category's subtypes apply), Othor AI (none of this category's subtypes apply), ReportGPT (none of this category's subtypes apply), Zenable (none of this category's subtypes apply), Exa (shares no subtype with this product), GPU-Bridge (we have not classified this record), Google Vertex AI Agent Engine (we have not classified this record), Google Vector Search 2.0 (shares no subtype with this product), Google Gemini Embedding 2 (shares no subtype with this product), Alibaba Cloud Qwen Code (none of this category's subtypes apply), E2B (shares no subtype with this product), Modal (shares no subtype with this product), ElevenLabs (we have not classified this record), Stability AI (we have not classified this record), Daytona (shares no subtype with this product), Blaxel (shares no subtype with this product), Novita Sandbox (shares no subtype with this product), Runloop (shares no subtype with this product), Mem0 (shares no subtype with this product), Zep (shares no subtype with this product), Letta (we have not classified this record), Supermemory (shares no subtype with this product), Cognee (shares no subtype with this product), Serper (shares no subtype with this product), Linkup (shares no subtype with this product), Parallel (shares no subtype with this product), Jina AI (shares no subtype with this product), You.com (shares no subtype with this product), Cloudflare AI Search (we have not classified this record), Valyu (shares no subtype with this product). Each is still listed in AI / ML, with the vendor's own words we read that from on its page. How we decide this.

See full comparison →

Recompute today's order yourself. The order above is a permutation seeded only on the UTC date and the query key — no vendor name, slug, id or offer field is an input. The list above is every one of the 27 entries in that order, not a prefix of it. The algorithm is published, so anyone can reproduce this page's order without asking us.

date: 2026-11-14
query_key: alternatives:AI / ML:OpenRouter
seed: 85c77d88d3c80df64889ff327c8916444ddc70e9e082c9ebbdc653c3c6f71639
tie_count: 12

Watch OpenRouter for Pricing Changes

We do not push notifications. Every change we record is readable the moment it lands, and the JSON answer carries an ETag — send it back as If-None-Match and an unchanged answer costs one 304.

curl https://agentdeals.dev/api/changes?vendor=OpenRouter
curl https://agentdeals.dev/pricing-changes/feed.xml?vendor=OpenRouter

API docs →

Frequently Asked Questions

Is OpenRouter free?

Yes, OpenRouter offers a free tier: Free. AI model router. Free plan: 50 requests a day, no BYOK. Free models are capped at 20 requests a minute; accounts that have bought at least $10 of credits get 1,000 free-model requests a day. OpenRoute...

What is OpenRouter's free tier?

OpenRouter's free tier is called "Free". AI model router. Free plan: 50 requests a day, no BYOK. Free models are capped at 20 requests a minute; accounts that have bought at least $10 of credits get 1,000 free-model requests a day. OpenRouter's pricing page says "25+ free models" and "4 free providers"; its model list (openrouter.ai/api/v1/models) had 17 model IDs ending in ":free" on 2026-10-20, and that list changes from week to week. The Standard plan (pay-as-you-go) charges a 5.5% fee on credit purchases and includes BYOK up to $25,000 of list-price inference a month with no fees, 5% after. The Business plan charges an 8% fee on credit purchases. It adds EU and US in-region routing: requests sent to eu.openrouter.ai or us.openrouter.ai stay with providers in that region. Free and Standard do not include in-region routing. No contract or sales call is needed. On 2026-08-19 OpenRouter announced it is joining Stripe. OpenRouter says it will continue to operate as it is, with the same name, product and roadmap, and that existing integrations do not change. OpenRouter's free models need no credit card. (From https://openrouter.ai/blog/tutorials/free-llm-apis-compared/, read 2026-10-22.) A request over a free-model limit gets a 429 error with the message "Rate limit exceeded". The daily limit counts by UTC day. (From https://openrouter.ai/docs/api-reference/limits, read 2026-10-29.) The paid variant of a model has no platform-level request cap. (From https://openrouter.ai/docs/api-reference/limits, read 2026-10-29.) With a negative credit balance, requests can fail, including for free models; adding credits to bring the balance above zero restores access. (From https://openrouter.ai/docs/api-reference/limits, read 2026-10-29.) OpenRouter does not store your prompts or responses unless you opt in to Private Input & Output Logging or OpenRouter Use of Inputs/Outputs, or content is flagged as potential CSAM. Both opt-ins are off by default. OpenRouter Use of Inputs/Outputs lets OpenRouter use prompt and completion data to improve the product, for a 1% discount on model usage. OpenRouter stores request metadata without prompt or response content. (From https://openrouter.ai/docs/guides/privacy/data-collection, read 2026-10-30.) Each provider has its own data handling policies. OpenRouter works with providers so that prompts are not trained on wherever possible, but there are exceptions. Account settings control routing to providers that may train on your data, separately for paid and free models. If you opt out of training, OpenRouter will not route to those providers. (From https://openrouter.ai/docs/guides/privacy/provider-logging, read 2026-10-30.)

Is OpenRouter's free tier reliable?

OpenRouter's free tier is considered stable. The one record we hold was our own error and has been withdrawn. See the pricing history below.

Is OpenRouter's free tier good for production?

OpenRouter's free tier can be suitable for small production workloads and side projects. We rate it stable and it offers AI model router. Free plan: 50 requests a day, no BYOK…, so it's a reasonable starting point. The one record we hold was our own error and has been withdrawn. Monitor your usage against the limits and have an upgrade plan ready.

What changed in OpenRouter's pricing?

The one record we hold was our own error and has been withdrawn.

What are the best free alternatives to OpenRouter?

We publish no ranking of these. Nothing we record measures popularity or generosity, so naming a best or a top few would be our preference rather than our data. We hold 27 free alternatives to OpenRouter in AI / ML, each listed above with its tier. Of those, 12 carry no recorded demerit and are indistinguishable under every signal we hold, so they are listed in an order that rotates daily, 6 are demoted with the reason named, 9 are listed last behind a stated gate. Our ranking rule is published at /criteria.

When will I outgrow OpenRouter's free tier?

At 50 requests/day, you'll need to upgrade. When you outgrow the free tier, evaluate paid plans against alternatives — sometimes a competitor's free tier covers what you need.

What category is OpenRouter in?

OpenRouter is categorized under AI / ML on AgentDeals. We list 27 other AI / ML services alongside it, every one of them on this page with its free tier and the stability we publish for it.