A field guide to AI that doesn't ask for your credit card

What it does This is an awesome-list that catalogs genuinely free AI resources—open-weight models you can self-host, API providers with free tiers, and tools to run everything locally. The maintainer treats it like a link-rot war room: the README claims roughly three hundred URLs were manually checked, with broken links, pricing changes, and unmaintained projects explicitly flagged. Think of it as a curated phone book for developers who refuse to hand over a credit card.

The interesting bit Most link lists dump URLs and decay; this one tracks the fragility of “free” in real time, noting provider pivots to paid billing, GitHub org renames, and repo archival. That makes it unusually useful as a living snapshot of which gratis AI resources are actually still standing.

Key highlights

• 17 categories covering models, APIs, chatbot UIs, CLI tools, RAG stacks, agentic frameworks, and sandboxes
• 36 open-weight models listed (Llama 4, DeepSeek V4, Qwen 3.6, Kimi K2.6) with release dates, parameter counts, and license tags
• Free API providers annotated with specific constraints: Cerebras offers 1M tokens/day, Groq is capped at 30 RPM, and Fireworks moved to prepaid billing in July 2026
• CC0 license, so the index itself is fully public domain
• Inline maintenance log noting zero broken links, two archived repos, three description fixes, and five unmaintained projects flagged

Caveats

• The README displays “last checked” badges dated June 23, 2026, which is either a typo or a very optimistic maintenance schedule
• Several “free” entries are trial credits (OpenAI, Anthropic ~$5) or referral programs (Hyperbolic), so zero-cost access still comes with strings attached

Verdict Worth bookmarking if you are prototyping on a budget or self-hosting open weights. Skip it if you are looking for a tutorial or a framework—this is pure curation, not code.