anytimelime — the free AI field report
What's free in AI right now — 2026-08-28
Five free models returned PASS (tool) today, out of the 23 entries in the roster. The other 18 either demand a payment method on file (DeepSeek‑V3.1, DeepSeek‑V3.2, Meta‑Llama‑3.3‑70B‑Instruct, etc.), hit provider errors (google/gemma‑4‑26b‑a4b‑it:free, liquid/lfm‑2.5‑2.6b:free, etc.), or gave an empty response (01‑ai/yi‑large, adept/fuyu‑8b, ai21labs/jamba‑1.5‑large‑instruct, etc.). Two entries (bigcode/starcoder2‑15b) never reached a verdict.
The reliable free callers are cohere/north‑mini‑code:free, dots‑studio/dots‑3‑note‑preview:free, inclusionai/ling‑3.0‑flash‑fin:free, deepseek‑ai/deepseek‑v4‑flash‑0731, and deepseek‑ai/deepseek‑v4‑pro‑0813. All others are gated, rate‑limited, or endpoint‑restricted. If you need a usable tool‑user today, stick to the PASS list.
How to use them without AnytimeLime
- Sign up at openrouter.ai.
- Create an API key in the dashboard and export it as
OPENROUTER_KEY. - Use the model IDs from the data directly. Example:
cohere/north-mini-code:free. - Hit
https://openrouter.ai/api/v1/chat/completionswith a normal OpenAI‑style chat payload.
Minimal curl:
curl https://openrouter.ai/api/v1/chat/completions \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $OPENROUTER_KEY" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{
"model": "cohere/north-mini-code:free",
"messages": [{"role":"user","content":"hello"}],
"tools": [{"type":"function","function":{"name":"ping","parameters":{"type":"object","properties":{}}}}]
}'
How to use them with AnytimeLime
- Clone the engine from github.com/fusionpoweredsoftware/anytimelime.
- Set
LIME_KEYto your OpenRouter API key (the key never leaves your machine). - Run
./lime.sh. It fetches today’s free‑model roster, probes each oneThe measured table
latency model vendor verdict agentic 0.2 01-ai/yi-largenvidia FAIL: empty response — 0.6 cohere/north-mini-code:freeopenrouter PASS (tool) — 0.3 DeepSeek-V3.1sambanova FAIL: A payment method is required. Add one at https://cloud.sambanova.ai/plans/billin — 0.2 adept/fuyu-8bnvidia FAIL: empty response — 2.3 dots-studio/dots-3-note-preview:freeopenrouter PASS (tool) — 0.3 DeepSeek-V3.2sambanova FAIL: A payment method is required. Add one at https://cloud.sambanova.ai/plans/billin — 0.1 ai21labs/jamba-1.5-large-instructnvidia FAIL: empty response — 0.3 google/gemma-4-26b-a4b-it:freeopenrouter FAIL: Provider returned error — 0.3 Meta-Llama-3.3-70B-Instructsambanova FAIL: A payment method is required. Add one at https://cloud.sambanova.ai/plans/billin — 0.2 aisingapore/sea-lion-7b-instructnvidia FAIL: empty response — 0.2 google/gemma-4-31b-it:freeopenrouter FAIL: Provider returned error — 0.3 MiniMax-M2.7sambanova FAIL: A payment method is required. Add one at https://cloud.sambanova.ai/plans/billin — 0.1 bigcode/starcoder2-15bnvidia — 0.2 google/lyria-3-clip-previewopenrouter FAIL: No endpoints found that support tool use. Try disabling "ping". To learn more ab — 0.3 MiniMax-M3sambanova FAIL: A payment method is required. Add one at https://cloud.sambanova.ai/plans/billin — 0.1 databricks/dbrx-instructnvidia FAIL: empty response — 0.2 google/lyria-3-pro-previewopenrouter FAIL: No endpoints found that support tool use. Try disabling "ping". To learn more ab — 0.3 gemma-4-31B-itsambanova FAIL: A payment method is required. Add one at https://cloud.sambanova.ai/plans/billin — 0.2 deepseek-ai/deepseek-coder-6.7b-instructnvidia FAIL: empty response — 0.9 inclusionai/ling-3.0-flash-fin:freeopenrouter PASS (tool) — 0.3 gpt-oss-120bsambanova FAIL: A payment method is required. Add one at https://cloud.sambanova.ai/plans/billin — 3.1 deepseek-ai/deepseek-v4-flash-0731nvidia PASS (tool) — 0.4 liquid/lfm-2.5-2.6b:freeopenrouter FAIL: Provider returned error — 32.4 deepseek-ai/deepseek-v4-pro-0813nvidia PASS (tool) —