Free routes · OpenRouter
OpenRouter Free Models
Free routes are useful for testing, small projects and low-volume workloads. But they often have rate limits, context limits and variable provider capacity.
Notable free options
This list used to start with an anonymous stealth preview. That route is gone: Union Alpha was revealed as Unbiased Pareto, delisted and billed, so the entry was dropped rather than left to rot — the tracker has the before-and-after. Every context figure below was read from the public catalogue on 2026-10-16, and the list is re-checked against that catalogue by the daily drift job: free routes disappear and change window size without notice, which is why this list is short and dated rather than long and confident.
| Model | Context | Best for |
|---|---|---|
| NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Lightning nvidia/nemotron-3.5-lightning:free | 1M tokens | Long-context testing |
| NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Super VL nvidia/nemotron-3.5-super-vl:free | 1M tokens | Open multimodal (text, image, video) |
| Thinking Machines Inkling thinkingmachines/inkling:free | 1.05M tokens | General experimentation |
| Free Models Router openrouter/free | 200K tokens | Simple free-tier routing |
Source
openrouter.ai/api/v1/models Verified 2026-10-16 Only $0-per-million routes; a cheap model is not a free route