A phone book for free LLM APIs, kept fresh by the crowd

What it does It’s a community-maintained directory of every provider offering LLM access at zero cost — permanent free tiers, trial credits, and no-card options. Each entry is labeled with the awkward details that usually surprise you post-signup: whether a credit card or phone verification is needed, rate limits, and daily/monthly caps. The repo syncs daily with the live site at free-llm.com, where users vote, submit, and suggest edits that get moderated before publishing.

The interesting bit The boring part is the value: free tiers rot fast, and this is essentially a changelog-watchers’ collective doing the rot-detection for you. It also ships ready-to-run Python/JavaScript/curl snippets for every active provider in code-examples/, plus configs for pointing Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, and OpenCode at free backends instead of paid ones.

Key highlights

• 450+ free models from 86 providers, plus 9 local/self-hosted tools for unlimited private use
• Credit card and verification transparency on every row — including “verify this yourself” flags where reports conflict
• Most providers expose OpenAI-compatible endpoints, so swapping is a baseURL + apiKey change
• Side-by-side comparison tool on free-llm.com for limits, models, and pricing
• Multilingual READMEs (English, Chinese, Japanese, Korean)

Caveats

• Many entries have unpublished or third-party-reported limits — the directory honestly marks these “verify” rather than pretending certainty
• Some “free” providers quietly require a card (Nous Portal, Hetzner), which the tables flag but you should still double-check
• It’s a directory, not a service — the code here is mostly the site and data plumbing, not the APIs themselves

Verdict Worth a bookmark if you prototype on free tiers, run coding assistants on a budget, or just want Groq’s limits without reading five changelogs. Skip it if you already pay for an API and like it that way.