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Re:How I code with AI on a budget/free by indigodaddy on Saturday August 09, 2025 @09:12PM (#44851937)
Is glm-4.5 air useable? I see it's free on Openrouter. Also pls advise what you think is the current best free openrouter model for coding. Thanks!
Re:How I code with AI on a budget/free by radio879 on Saturday August 09, 2025 @10:39PM (#44852362)
Well, if you download Qwen Code https://github.com/QwenLM/qwen-code it is free up to 2000 api calls a day.

Not sure if GLM-4.5 Air is good, but non-Air one is fabulous. I know for free API access there is pollinations ai project. Also llm7. If you just use the web chat's you can use most of the best models for free without API. There are ways to 'emulate' an API automatically.. I was thinking about adding this to my aicodeprep-gui app so it could automatically paste and then cut. Some MCP servers exist that you can use and it will automatically paste or cut from those web chat's and route it to an API interface.

OpenAI offers free tokens for most models, 2.5mil or 250k depending on model. Cerebras has some free limits, Gemini... Meta has plentiful free API for Llama 4 because.. lets face it, it sucks, but it is okay/not bad for stuff like summarizing text.

If you really wanted to code for exactly $0 you could use pollinations ai, in Cline extension (for VS Code) set to use "openai-large" (which is GPT 4.1). If you plan using all the best web chat's like Kimi K2, z.ai's GLM models, Qwen 3 chat, Gemini in AI Studio, OpenAI playground with o3 or o4-mini. You can go forever without being charged money. Pollinations 'openai-large' works fine in Cline as an agent to edit files for you etc.

Re:How I code with AI on a budget/free by indigodaddy on Saturday August 09, 2025 @11:05PM (#44852483)
Very cool, a lot to chew on here. Thanks so much for the feedback!
Re:How I code with AI on a budget/free by tummler on Sunday August 10, 2025 @08:16AM (#44854691)
Anecdotal, but Grok seems to have just introduced pretty restrictive rate limits. They’re now giving free users access to Grok 4 with a low limit and then making it difficult to manually switch to Grok 3 and continue. Will only allow a few more requests before pushing an upgrade to paid plans. Just started happening to me last night.
Re:How I code with AI on a budget/free by tonyhart7 on Sunday August 10, 2025 @01:20AM (#44852945)
bro you are final boss of free tier users lol
Re:How I code with AI on a budget/free by radio879 on Sunday August 10, 2025 @01:47AM (#44853028)
damn right !!!!