Free GPT-4 inside your Mac launcher, no API key needed

What it does This Raycast extension drops GPT-4, Claude, Llama, and Gemini into a macOS keyboard launcher without charging your credit card. It acts as a client for a rotating roster of free third-party providers—Nexra, Blackbox, DuckDuckGo, DeepInfra, and others—and falls back to custom APIs if you have them. You get streaming responses, persistent chat history, web search, file uploads on select backends, and image generation, all from the command palette.

The interesting bit The README includes a hand-curated, self-rated league table of providers where the author scores each model like a restaurant critic reviewing street food. It is a refreshingly honest admission that free tiers are volatile: several providers are already marked inactive or carry an unknown status badge, and the extension ships its own auto-updater because it is not distributed through the Raycast Extension Store.

Key highlights

• 18 built-in commands, including custom AI shortcuts with user-defined prompts
• File upload support for images, video, audio, and text on vision-capable providers
• Built-in automatic updater, since the extension is absent from the Raycast Store
• Optional Python dependencies unlock web search functionality
• Custom API endpoint support when you outgrow the free backends

Caveats

• Raycast itself is macOS-only, so Windows and Linux users are excluded
• Not published on the Raycast Extension Store; must be built from source
• Provider reliability varies; the README shows several models as inactive or unknown
• File uploads and some features are limited to specific providers

Verdict A pragmatic choice for Mac users who want instant AI access without another monthly subscription; skip it if you need cross-platform polish or official store distribution.