anytimelime — the free AI field report

2026-09-07 · generated by a free model interviewing free models · anytimelime, formerly Project42 · get the engine →

What's free in AI right now — 2026-09-07

Today's probe scraped 24 models and only six actually called a tool. The coder‑flavored cohere/north-mini-code:free (3.1s) still hacks a function, while the note‑taking dots-studio/dots-3-note-preview:free (1.3s) adds a sentence. The financial flash inclusionai/ling-3.0-flash-fin:free (0.7s) stays the quickest, but inclusionai/ling-3.0-flash-sante:free (0.9s) lets you pull health‑record snippets. The lightweight liquid/lfm-2.5-2.6b:free (0.8s) proves latency under a second still exists, and a new heavyweight, deepseek-ai/deepseek-v4-flash-0731 (7.3s), finally cleared the tool call gate. All others either demand a payment method, return empty responses, or burned our rate limit before we could test.

Compared to last week’s five passers, the roster expanded by one and swapped out the MiniMax entry – the churn is the only constant. If you’re building a pipeline that leans on a free model, keep the scripts flexible and re‑run the probe before you ship; 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 – cohere/north-mini-code:free, dots-studio/dots-3-note-preview:free, inclusionai/ling-3.0-flash-fin:free, inclusionai/ling-3.0-flash-sante:free, liquid/lfm-2.5-2.6b:free, and deepseek-ai/deepseek-v4-flash-0731 – so no single free tier carries all your traffic. Your key lives on your own machine; the website never asks for it.

If you already have an OpenRouter key, those model IDs work directly with any OpenAI‑compatible client (e.g., cURL, LangChain, OpenAI SDK). No AnytimeLime wrapper 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 six 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.

Today's passing roster

inclusionai/ling-3.0-flash-fin:free — openrouter · 0.7s · agentic 3/5
liquid/lfm-2.5-2.6b:free — openrouter · 0.8s · agentic 3/5
inclusionai/ling-3.0-flash-sante:free — openrouter · 0.9s · agentic 3/5
dots-studio/dots-3-note-preview:free — openrouter · 1.3s · agentic 3/5
cohere/north-mini-code:free — openrouter · 3.1s · agentic 3/5
deepseek-ai/deepseek-v4-flash-0731 — nvidia · 7.3s · agentic 3/5

The measured table

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

latency	model	vendor	verdict	agentic
1.0	`openai`	Pollinations AI	FAIL: unparseable	—
0.2	`01-ai/yi-large`	nvidia	FAIL: empty response	—
3.1	`cohere/north-mini-code:free`	openrouter	PASS (tool)	3/5
0.4	`DeepSeek-V3.1`	sambanova	FAIL: A payment method is required. Add one at https://cloud.sambanova.ai/plans/billin	—
1.0	`openai-fast`	Pollinations AI	FAIL: unparseable	—
0.2	`adept/fuyu-8b`	nvidia	FAIL: empty response	—
1.3	`dots-studio/dots-3-note-preview:free`	openrouter	PASS (tool)	3/5
0.3	`DeepSeek-V3.2`	sambanova	FAIL: A payment method is required. Add one at https://cloud.sambanova.ai/plans/billin	—
0.1	`ai21labs/jamba-1.5-large-instruct`	nvidia	FAIL: empty response	—
0.3	`google/gemma-4-26b-a4b-it:free`	openrouter	FAIL: Provider returned error	—
0.3	`Meta-Llama-3.3-70B-Instruct`	sambanova	FAIL: A payment method is required. Add one at https://cloud.sambanova.ai/plans/billin	—
0.1	`aisingapore/sea-lion-7b-instruct`	nvidia	FAIL: empty response	—
0.2	`google/gemma-4-31b-it:free`	openrouter	FAIL: Provider returned error	—
0.3	`MiniMax-M2.7`	sambanova	FAIL: A payment method is required. Add one at https://cloud.sambanova.ai/plans/billin	—
0.1	`bigcode/starcoder2-15b`	nvidia	FAIL: empty response	—
0.7	`inclusionai/ling-3.0-flash-fin:free`	openrouter	PASS (tool)	3/5
0.3	`MiniMax-M3`	sambanova	FAIL: A payment method is required. Add one at https://cloud.sambanova.ai/plans/billin	—
0.1	`databricks/dbrx-instruct`	nvidia	FAIL: empty response	—
0.9	`inclusionai/ling-3.0-flash-sante:free`	openrouter	PASS (tool)	3/5
0.3	`gemma-4-31B-it`	sambanova	FAIL: A payment method is required. Add one at https://cloud.sambanova.ai/plans/billin	—
0.2	`deepseek-ai/deepseek-coder-6.7b-instruct`	nvidia	FAIL: empty response	—
0.8	`liquid/lfm-2.5-2.6b:free`	openrouter	PASS (tool)	3/5
0.3	`gpt-oss-120b`	sambanova	FAIL: A payment method is required. Add one at https://cloud.sambanova.ai/plans/billin	—
7.3	`deepseek-ai/deepseek-v4-flash-0731`	nvidia	PASS (tool)	3/5

6 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.