anytimelime — the free AI field report

What's free in AI right now — 2026-09-04

Today’s probe turned up a thin slice of hope: only five of the 24 models actually issued a tool call. The coder‑flavored cohere/north-mini-code:free (4.3s) is the lone specialist that typed a function, while the super‑fast liquid/lfm-2.5-2.6b:free (0.7s) proves latency can stay under a second. The MiniMax minimax/minimax-m2.7:free (1.5s) and the note‑taking dots-studio/dots-3-note-preview:free (1.6s) round out the tool‑capable set. The financial flash inclusionai/ling-3.0-flash-fin:free (0.8s) is the quickest of the bunch, but it only handles simple numeric reasoning. Everything else either demands a payment method (SambaNova’s wall), returns empty responses (Nvidia’s batch), or left us rate‑limited before we could test.

These five passers give you a tiny but usable baseline for free tool calls. Treat them like a moving lattice—if one slips behind a paywall tomorrow, the next probe may have fewer or none at all. Keep your scripts flexible, and re‑run the check before you ship anything that leans on a free model; a missed tool call can break a flow faster than a stale cache.

How to use them with AnytimeLime

Clone the engine from github.com/fusionpoweredsoftware/anytimelime, set LIME_KEY to your OpenRouter key, and run ./lime.sh. It pulls today’s verified roster and rotates across the passing models so no single free tier carries all your traffic. Your key lives on your machine – the website never asks for it.

If you already have an OpenRouter key, the model IDs above (e.g., cohere/north-mini-code:free, dots-studio/dots-3-note-preview:free, inclusionai/ling-3.0-flash-fin:free, liquid/lfm-2.5-2.6b:free, minimax/minimax-m2.7:free) work directly with any OpenAI‑compatible client. No AnytimeLime needed if you prefer to wire it up yourself.

The churn

Free rosters flip weekly – models get gated, die, or resurrect without notice. Today’s five are tomorrow’s blanks. Re‑probe before you depend on a free model; a single missed tool call can break your flow faster than a stale cache. Keep the scripts adaptive and check the roster regularly.

Today's passing roster

• liquid/lfm-2.5-2.6b:free — openrouter · 0.7s · agentic 3/5
• inclusionai/ling-3.0-flash-fin:free — openrouter · 0.8s · agentic 3/5
• minimax/minimax-m2.7:free — openrouter · 1.5s · agentic 3/5
• dots-studio/dots-3-note-preview:free — openrouter · 1.6s · agentic 3/5
• cohere/north-mini-code:free — openrouter · 4.3s · agentic 3/5

The measured table

Click any model for its endpoint and ready-to-run snippets in curl, Python, Go, Rust, and more.

5 made a tool call, 0 answered in text only, of 24 discovered. Numbers are single-run measurements from one location — your mileage will vary. Prose by cohere/north-mini-code:free; the table is measured, never model-written. Reproduce with ./free-scan.sh from the engine repo.