Free LLM API access for students and side projects

A student budget usually means no company card and no appetite for a trial that quietly expires. What matters is three things: models good enough to actually ship something with, a standard API so the code isn't thrown away later, and a way to stay at $0 that doesn't have a hard deadline.

AnyRouter covers all three the same way it does for any account — the free path isn't a stripped-down mode, it's the same OpenAI-compatible endpoint and the same catalog, just gated by a daily allowance instead of a card.

anyrouter/free routes to healthy free-tier capacity on the Go plan ($2/mo, or free if you donate a provider key), with a 1,000 requests/day allowance and no credit required. It's the fastest way to wire a class project or prototype to a real model before deciding whether it's worth paying for tokens.

curl https://anyrouter.dev/api/v1/chat/completions \
-H "Authorization: Bearer sk-ar-v1-..." \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{
  "model": "anyrouter/free",
  "messages": [{ "role": "user", "content": "Summarize this in one sentence" }]
}'

Because it's the same endpoint as every paid model, nothing about this code changes later if the project grows past the daily allowance.

A side project that starts getting real use will outgrow the daily allowance. Go is $2/mo — a $4 credit added to your balance automatically (roughly 16M tokens on fast models) on top of the free-tier models. If usage keeps growing from there, Pro ($10/mo), Pro+ ($45/mo), and Max ($100/mo) raise the rolling rate-limit window.

Students often already hold free-tier keys from a class assignment or a personal project — Google AI Studio's Gemini free tier is a common one. BYOK lets you attach that key and route through it at $0 markup, so a key you're not fully using pays for itself instead of sitting idle.

Go further and donate the spare capacity on that key to the shared pool: every request the pool serves through it adds up to 8% of the request's cost to a pending balance you can claim as credits, and donating one working key also makes the $2/mo Go plan free for as long as it stays active.

The point of using a standard, OpenAI-compatible endpoint from day one is that a class project, hackathon entry, or early side hustle doesn't need a rewrite if it turns into something real — the same base URL and key that served free-tier requests scale to a catalog of 170+ models without touching the client code.

• Start on Go — anyrouter/free, $2/mo or donate a key, 1,000 requests/day.
• Attach a free-tier provider key you already have — /byok.
• Read the endpoint reference before you build — /docs.