About

free-ai is an OpenAI-compatible gateway on top of a fleet of free LLM providers. Send one request; the gateway scores 30+ candidate models on per-IP rate-limit headroom, recent success rate, latency, and capability fit, then routes to the best one with retry on failure.

Why

Free tiers exist on Groq, Cerebras, SambaNova, OpenRouter, Workers AI, Gemini, NVIDIA, and a few more. Each has different rate limits, model coverage, and reliability. Routing across all of them gives you meaningful free-tier throughput plus automatic fallback when one is down — without you having to maintain the matrix.

Capability filtering

• Requests with tools route only to tool-capable models.
• response_format: json_object routes to JSON-mode models.
• Image content routes to vision-capable models.
• If no candidate matches, the gateway returns 503 with a clear reason.

Cost guardrails

Committed Cloudflare config is intentionally free-first: WORKERS_AI_ENABLED="false" by default, CPU capped at the Workers Free limit, Workers Logs sampling off, no paid Rate Limiting binding. A pnpm audit:cloudflare-costs step runs in pnpm check and the deploy pipeline, so a cost regression fails the build before it ships.

API shape

Use it like the OpenAI SDK. Set baseURL to https://ai-gateway.sassmaker.com/v1 and pass a project_id in the body so usage gets logged against your project for analytics.