The top website for free LLM models — and how they're actually free

We pulled real usage from the gateway — every generation served for free from launch through July 11, 2026 — and ranked the underlying models. The shape is lopsided: two models carry most of the free traffic while a long tail each sees a handful of calls.

GLM-5.2 dominates by both requests and tokens (north of 200M free tokens served) because it's a strong, fast coding model with enough free capacity to run real work on. gpt-4o-mini is the opposite: many tiny requests, the classifier-and-glue model inside loops. The full breakdown is in /blog/most-used-free-models.

"Free" here isn't a marketing asterisk — it's three concrete routes, each with clear limits:

1. The anyrouter/free tier — a rotating router over whatever free capacity is healthy. Requires the Go plan ($2/mo, or donate a key); capped at 1,000 requests/day, no credit spent.
2. The donated shared pool — members donate spare provider quota; those keys pool together and members draw on the sum. BYOK traffic never deducts credits, and donors earn 8% back.
3. Self-hosted on-device models — a first-party local relay serves models running on your own paired hardware, including Apple's on-device Foundation Model, at no provider cost.

Each is honest about its ceiling: the daily tier has a request cap, the pool depends on donated headroom (and requires you to donate to draw on it on the Free plan), and on-device inference needs your own hardware.

Read /free for the anyrouter/free tier (Go plan, 1,000 req/day), browse the catalog on /models, and donate an idle key at /donate to unlock the pool and earn credits back.

• The $2 (or free) plan that unlocks the free tier — /blog/free-models-one-dollar.
• How the donated pool pays donors back — /blog/shared-key-pool.
• On-device inference through the gateway — /blog/apple-foundation-models-on-device.