AI coding assistants are incredible — until the API bill arrives. If you've ever watched your Claude Code or Cursor usage tick upward and wondered whether there's a cheaper way, this guide is for you.
The good news: in 2026, the free tier landscape for LLM APIs is genuinely good. Not "free trial for 7 days" good — permanently free, no credit card required, production-usable models. The bad news: the information is scattered across dozens of provider docs, and free tiers change constantly.
Here's the practical setup I actually use.
Not all free tiers are equal. These are the ones with permanent free tiers, no credit card required:
| Provider | Standout model | Why it's good |
|---|---|---|
| Google AI Studio | Gemini 2.5 Flash (1M context, multimodal) | Most capable free tier, 500 req/day |
| Groq | Llama 3.3 70B, gpt-oss-120b | Fastest inference, ultra-low latency |
| NVIDIA NIM | 100+ open models (DeepSeek R1/V3, Llama) | Huge selection, one API key |
| OpenRouter | 35+ free models | Single key, single endpoint for everything |
| Cerebras | Llama 3.3 70B | Extremely fast |
| Mistral | Mistral Small/Medium | ~1B tokens/month free |
The full comparison — rate limits, context windows, credit card requirements — is maintained at freellm.net, a directory of 489 free models across 30 providers. I use it as my reference because free tiers change often and static lists go stale fast.
Pick one provider to start. My recommendation for coding: Google AI Studio (best model quality) or Groq (best speed).
That's it. You now have a working LLM API key that costs $0.
Claude Code reads two environment variables to override its backend:
export ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL="https://generativelanguage.googleapis.com/v1beta/openai"
export ANTHROPIC_AUTH_TOKEN="your-google-ai-studio-key"
(For Groq: ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL="https://api.groq.com/openai/v1".)
Then just run claude as normal. It will route through the free provider instead of Anthropic's API.
For Cursor: Settings → Models → Add Model, paste the base URL and key.
For Codex CLI: set OPENAI_BASE_URL + OPENAI_API_KEY.
Ready-to-copy snippets for every provider/model combination are at freellm.net/config — pick your tool, pick your model, paste.
Before wiring a key into your daily workflow, test it. The freellm.net playground lets you paste a key and chat with any model right in the browser — no install, and your key goes directly to the provider, never stored on their servers.
Free tiers have limits, and you should know them upfront:
$0/month. I do the bulk of my AI-assisted coding on Gemini 2.5 Flash via Google AI Studio's free tier, and fall back to Groq when I need speed. When I hit a rate limit (rare), I switch providers — which takes 30 seconds since it's just env vars.
If you're a student, indie hacker, or just cost-conscious, there's no reason to pay for API access while these tiers exist. The setup takes less time than reading this article did.
Reference: freellm.net — 489 free LLM APIs from 30 providers, with rate limits, context windows, and one-click configs for Claude Code, Cursor, and Codex.