Open source alternative to OpenRouter, Vercel AI Gateway, Portkey, Braintrust Gateway and DMXAPI
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Connect to 635 free LLM models across 34 providers with one OpenAI-compatible API key, automatic failover, smart routing, and encrypted key storage.
FreeLLMAPI gives Claude Code, Codex CLI, Cline, Aider, and 12 other agents a free model pool to draw from. Setup generators configure the agent in one command, pointing it at localhost:3001 with the unified key. No credit card, no usage bill.
Skip if you need production SLA guarantees or multi-user isolation. The tool is designed for single-user personal use, and the repository explicitly scopes it to personal experimentation.
The live catalog covers 474 model families across 34 providers. The admin dashboard playground lets you test prompts against any model in the pool. Per-key usage counters surface which provider is closest to its rate cap in real time.
Skip if your evaluation needs are commercial or team-wide. FreeLLMAPI aggregates free tiers only; paid-tier models are not in scope unless you add a custom OpenAI-compatible endpoint.
7.4 billion tokens per month across 635 endpoints is a meaningful inference budget for solo development. The router handles failover silently, so your app keeps working when one provider hits its rate limit. MIT license means you can ship a product built on it without licensing friction.
Skip if your application will serve multiple end users making concurrent requests. FreeLLMAPI is a single-user local router, not a multi-tenant API gateway.
Every major AI lab now offers a free inference tier: a few million tokens per month, a few thousand requests per day. The challenge is that stacking thirty-four of these tiers by hand is painful. Each provider has its own SDK, its own rate-limit policy, and its own failure mode. A single application needs thirty-four API keys, thirty-four error handlers, and thirty-four places a request can silently drop.
Beyond the integration cost, the free-tier landscape changes constantly. Providers launch models, retire them, and change quotas without notice. Keeping a hand-rolled aggregator in sync requires ongoing maintenance on top of the original engineering work. Most developers either limit themselves to one or two providers, accepting unnecessary cost ceilings, or take on the burden of a brittle multi-provider setup.
A single /v1 endpoint accepts any OpenAI-compatible client: SDKs, coding agents, or direct HTTP. The router exposes chat completions, embeddings, image generation, audio, and the Responses API that Codex CLI requires. Anthropic SDK clients can use /v1/messages directly, and Gemini CLI speaks its native /v1beta wire.
Live per-model speed, capability, and reliability scores rank the fallback chain for each request. On a 429 or 5xx, the router retries the next available model automatically, with cooldowns and key rotation to stay under every free-tier cap. Six configurable routing strategies let you bias toward speed, capability, or cost.
The router pulls a signed catalog from freellmapi.co twice daily. New models, quota changes, and provider-quirk fixes land without a git pull or container restart. Free installs receive the monthly snapshot (30-day delay per model); premium routers get updates the same day.
Provider API keys are AES-256-GCM encrypted in SQLite and decrypted in-memory per request. Your applications see only a single unified freellmapi bearer token. Bulk import, export, and scheduled health checks are available from the admin dashboard.
Request the virtual fusion model and the router fans your prompt out to a panel of diverse free models in parallel, then a judge model synthesizes one answer from the drafts. Useful for tasks where consensus across multiple models improves output quality without additional cost.
A native menu-bar app runs the full router locally on macOS and Windows. Setup generators like npx freellmapi setup-claude and setup-codex configure Claude Code, Codex CLI, Cline, Aider, and 12 other agents automatically, backing up your existing config before merging.
Both aggregate multiple LLM providers behind a single API endpoint. The core difference is hosting model: OpenRouter is a managed cloud service; FreeLLMAPI is self-hosted software you run on your own machine.
| Feature | FreeLLMAPI | OpenRouter |
|---|---|---|
| License | MIT | Proprietary |
| Self-hosting | Yes | No |
| Provider keys | Your own | Platform-managed |
| Routing fee | None | Per-token markup |
| Catalog updates | Daily (premium) / Monthly (free) | Real-time |
FreeLLMAPI is the better choice when you want data locality, zero routing overhead, and full control over which provider keys you use. OpenRouter is the better choice when you need a zero-config managed service with immediate access to paid models or when self-hosting is not practical.
Portkey is a commercial AI gateway targeting teams and production workloads, with multi-user access, observability, and an SLA-backed managed service. FreeLLMAPI is a single-user local router scoped to personal experimentation.
| Feature | FreeLLMAPI | Portkey |
|---|---|---|
| License | MIT | Proprietary |
| Target user | Individual developers | Teams, production |
| Multi-user access | No | Yes |
| Core cost | Free | Paid subscription |
| Managed reliability | Self-hosted | SLA-backed |
FreeLLMAPI wins on cost and data privacy for personal use. Portkey wins when you need team-level access controls, observability dashboards, or production reliability guarantees that a self-hosted single-user router cannot provide.
Vercel AI Gateway is a managed service tightly integrated with the Vercel deployment platform, designed for switching between LLM providers in Vercel-hosted applications.
| Feature | FreeLLMAPI | Vercel AI Gateway |
|---|---|---|
| License | MIT | Proprietary |
| Self-hosting | Yes | No |
| Platform dependency | None | Vercel ecosystem |
| Free tier focus | Yes | Model-agnostic |
FreeLLMAPI is the right pick for developers who host applications outside the Vercel ecosystem or who specifically want to aggregate free provider tiers at zero routing cost. Vercel AI Gateway is the better fit for Vercel-hosted projects where platform integration and developer experience matter more than data locality.
Self-hosting uses Docker and takes one setup command to install.
```bash
curl -fsSL https://freellmapi.co/install.sh | bash
```The core router is free and MIT licensed. You run it on your own hardware with your own provider API keys, which are also free. A premium subscription at $19 per year (or $49 one-time lifetime) unlocks same-day model catalog updates; free installs receive the monthly snapshot with a 30-day delay per model.
FreeLLMAPI aggregates free tiers from 34 providers including Google, Groq, Cerebras, Mistral, Cloudflare, Cohere, NVIDIA, HuggingFace, and OpenRouter. The full list with per-model rate limits, context windows, and token budgets is at freellmapi.co/models. You can also add any OpenAI-compatible custom endpoint.
Yes. FreeLLMAPI includes automated setup generators for Claude Code, Codex CLI, Cline, Roo Code, Continue, Aider, Goose, and Cursor, among others. The npx freellmapi setup-claude command configures Claude Code to use the local router in one step, backing up your existing config before merging.
Yes. The router exposes a full OpenAI-compatible /v1 endpoint: chat completions, embeddings, image generation, audio, and the Responses API. It also speaks the Anthropic Messages API wire format for Claude Code and the Anthropic SDK, and the Gemini /v1beta format for Gemini CLI.
The fastest path is a one-liner: curl -fsSL https://freellmapi.co/install.sh | bash. It sets up a directory, generates an AES-256-GCM encryption key, pulls the Docker image, and starts the container on port 3001. Windows users can download the .exe installer from the GitHub Releases page; macOS has a native menu-bar app.
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