anytimelime — the free AI field report

2026-09-08 · generated by a free model interviewing free models · anytimelime, formerly Project42 · get the engine →

What's free in AI right now — 2026-09-08

Today’s probe scraped 24 models and only four cleared the tool‑call gate. The coder‑flavored cohere/north-mini-code:free (1.0s) still hacks a function, while the note‑taking dots-studio/dots-3-note-preview:free (1.7s) adds a sentence. The financial flash inclusionai/ling-3.0-flash-fin:free (0.9s) stays the quickest, and its health‑sante counterpart inclusionai/ling-3.0-flash-sante:free (0.9s) lets you pull record snippets. All other entries either demand a payment method (SambaNova’s wall, Nvidia’s empty responses), return empty replies, or burned our rate limit before we could test. The passing set is tiny but usable for a pipeline that can tolerate a 1‑second latency ceiling.

Compared to last week’s five passers, today’s roster slipped by one and swapped out the MiniMax entry – the churn is the only constant. If you’re stitching a flow on free models, keep the scripts flexible and re‑run the probe before you ship; a missed tool call can break a pipeline 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, and inclusionai/ling-3.0-flash-sante:free – 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 (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 four are tomorrow’s blanks. Re‑probe before you depend on a free model; a single missed tool call can break a flow faster than a stale cache. Keep the scripts adaptive and check the roster regularly.

Today's passing roster

The measured table

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

latencymodelvendorverdictagentic
0.1gpt-4ogpt4free / g4f (self-hosted)FAIL: empty response—
—*FreeLLMAPI (self-hosted gateway, ~34 free providers)FAIL: needs key—
—kimiLLM-Red-Team kimi-free-api (self-hosted)FAIL: needs key—
0.3DeepSeek-V3.1sambanovaFAIL: A payment method is required. Add one at https://cloud.sambanova.ai/plans/billin—
0.201-ai/yi-largenvidiaFAIL: empty response—
1.0cohere/north-mini-code:freeopenrouterPASS (tool)3/5
0.3DeepSeek-V3.1sambanovaFAIL: A payment method is required. Add one at https://cloud.sambanova.ai/plans/billin—
0.3Meta-Llama-3.3-70B-InstructsambanovaFAIL: A payment method is required. Add one at https://cloud.sambanova.ai/plans/billin—
0.1adept/fuyu-8bnvidiaFAIL: empty response—
1.7dots-studio/dots-3-note-preview:freeopenrouterPASS (tool)3/5
0.3DeepSeek-V3.2sambanovaFAIL: A payment method is required. Add one at https://cloud.sambanova.ai/plans/billin—
0.3gpt-oss-120bSambaNova CloudFAIL: A payment method is required. Add one at https://cloud.sambanova.ai/plans/billin—
0.2ai21labs/jamba-1.5-large-instructnvidiaFAIL: empty response—
0.3google/gemma-4-26b-a4b-it:freeopenrouterFAIL: Provider returned error—
0.3Meta-Llama-3.3-70B-InstructsambanovaFAIL: A payment method is required. Add one at https://cloud.sambanova.ai/plans/billin—
0.2aisingapore/sea-lion-7b-instructnvidiaFAIL: empty response—
0.2google/gemma-4-31b-it:freeopenrouterFAIL: Provider returned error—
0.3MiniMax-M2.7sambanovaFAIL: A payment method is required. Add one at https://cloud.sambanova.ai/plans/billin—
0.1bigcode/starcoder2-15bnvidiaFAIL: empty response—
1.0inclusionai/ling-3.0-flash-fin:freeopenrouterPASS (tool)3/5
0.3MiniMax-M3sambanovaFAIL: A payment method is required. Add one at https://cloud.sambanova.ai/plans/billin—
0.1databricks/dbrx-instructnvidiaFAIL: empty response—
0.9inclusionai/ling-3.0-flash-sante:freeopenrouterPASS (tool)3/5
0.3gemma-4-31B-itsambanovaFAIL: A payment method is required. Add one at https://cloud.sambanova.ai/plans/billin—

4 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.