The most-used free models on AnyRouter so far

AnyRouter has a set of models you can call for $0 — no credit spent, no BYOK key required once unlocked. They fall into three buckets: the anyrouter/free virtual model (a rotating router over whatever free capacity is healthy; Go plan required, capped at 1,000 requests/day), models a provider gives away on a genuine free tier that we pool and serve at cost-zero, and the shared key pool where members donate spare provider quota so everyone can draw on the sum.

This post looks at real traffic through those free routes. We took every generation the gateway recorded from launch through July 11, 2026, kept only the requests we actually served for free (no credit charged, not a bring-your-own-key call), and ranked the underlying models by request volume. No estimates, no projections — just the counts.

Here are the ten most-used free models by number of free-served requests, all-time, as of July 11, 2026:

The shape is lopsided, and that's the interesting part. Two models — GLM-5.2 and gpt-4o-mini — account for the overwhelming majority of free traffic, while a long tail of capable models each sees a handful of calls. Reach isn't the same as popularity: a model has to be both free and worth reaching for.

GLM-5.2 isn't just the most-used free model — by tokens served it dwarfs everything else, north of 200M free tokens. It's a strong, fast, long-context coding and reasoning model, and enough of that capacity is available at $0 (through provider free tiers and the shared pool) that people run real workloads on it, not just test prompts. High request count and high tokens-per-request is the signature of a model doing actual work.

gpt-4o-mini tells the opposite story: lots of requests, very few tokens each. It's the classifier-and-glue model — cheap enough to sit inside a loop, small enough that each call is a sentence or two. Different job, still free, still heavily used.

And anyrouter/free sitting at #3 is the point of the free tier working as designed: people who don't want to think about which model, just call anyrouter/free and let the router pick healthy free capacity for them.

None of this runs on our balance sheet alone. The free models above are funded by a shared key pool: members sign up for a provider's free tier, donate that key, and the quotas add up into one pool everyone can call. Donors earn 8% back and get Go for free. Here's the shape of it:

That's why the free tier can serve hundreds of thousands of requests without a paywall behind it — the capacity is contributed, not purchased. The more people donate spare quota, the more free capacity there is for everyone.

The public data page tracks all of this live — aggregate tokens, requests, and the top models by consumption, with no per-user data exposed:

Every model in the table is callable right now with a signed-in account and no spend:

• Just want it to work — call anyrouter/free on the Go plan and let the router pick free capacity (1,000 requests/day).
• Want a specific model — call it by id (e.g. z-ai/glm-5.2); free routes are used first where available.
• See the free catalog — /free lists every model you can run at $0.
• Grow the pool — /donate lets you contribute a spare key, earn 8% back, and go free on Go.