anytimelime — the free AI field report
What's free in AI right now — 2026-09-13
This morning the only non‑OpenRouter free tier that survived the probe is deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V4-Flash-0731. At 6.5 seconds it’s a slow‑burn workhorse from Gonka Broker while every other free‑tool that answered lives behind OpenRouter’s wall. The OpenRouter set (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, inclusionai/ling-3.0-flash-vl:free) are the usual suspects—sub‑second to ~1.7 s and all tool‑ready. If you need a quick note or a coder’s nudge you’ll still land in the OpenRouter bucket, but the deepseek flash gives you a different flavor (larger context, more reasoning) for the same price of free—just with a coffee‑break latency. Nothing new debuted or died; the churn is the same OpenRouter‑only lineup with a lone Gonka outlier.
Running the day’s free models
Pick cohere/north-mini-code:free for rapid snippet generation (≈0.8 s). dots-studio/dots-3-note-preview:free still drops a concise note in 1.7 s if you need a quick summary. The three inclusionai flashes cover finance, health and vision with consistent sub‑second speeds (0.8‑1.0 s). They’re the reliable workhorses for pipelines that can tolerate a second or two. The deepseek flash is the heavyweight: 6.5 s but tool‑capable, so use it for batch‑style reasoning rather than latency‑sensitive flows. The rest of the roster is silent, behind a payment wall, or vanished into an empty response.
What it means for builders on free tiers
The free tier today is a micro‑ecosystem: OpenRouter’s “:free” set stays stable enough for a tolerant pipeline, while any model that isn’t OpenRouter (the deepseek flash) is a rare find. If you’re building something that can chew on a 6‑second chunk, you’ve got a niche advantage; otherwise stick to the OpenRouter lineup and rotate to keep any single quota from expiring. The wall at SambaNova (Meta‑Llama‑3.3, MiniMax, DeepSeek‑V3.x) means you’ll still need a payment method for the heavy‑weight Llama‑3.3‑70B‑Instruct‑style models until they open a free window. The churn is still daily—models disappear or gatekeep without warning—so re‑probe before you lock in a dependency.
Clone github.com/fusionpoweredsoftware/anytimelime, set LIME_KEY to your OpenRouter key, and run ./lime.sh. It pulls today’s verified roster, rotates across the passing models, and never spills your key.
Today's passing roster
inclusionai/ling-3.0-flash-fin:free— openrouter · 0.8s · agentic 3/5inclusionai/ling-3.0-flash-sante:free— openrouter · 0.9s · agentic 3/5inclusionai/ling-3.0-flash-vl:free— openrouter · 1.0s · agentic 3/5cohere/north-mini-code:free— openrouter · 1.2s · agentic 3/5dots-studio/dots-3-note-preview:free— openrouter · 1.7s · agentic 3/5deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V4-Flash-0731— Gonka Broker · 6.5s · agentic 3/5
The measured table
| latency | model | vendor | tool call | free now | agentic | yesterday | 3 days ago | a week ago |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0.4 | mistral-small-4 | Mistral La Plateforme | untested | DOWN | — | · | · | · |
| 0.2 | meta/llama-3.3-70b-instruct | NVIDIA NIM | untested | DOWN | — | · | · | · |
| 0.7 | deepseek/deepseek-r1 | Novita AI | untested | DOWN | — | · | · | · |
| — | llama-3.3-70b-instruct | Scaleway Generative APIs | untested | DOWN | — | · | · | · |
| 6.5 | deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V4-Flash-0731 | Gonka Broker | yes | FREE | 3/5 | ✓ | · | · |
| 0.3 | meganova-ai/manta-flash-1.0 | MegaNova AI | untested | DOWN | — | ✓ | · | · |
| 0.3 | aisingapore/Gemma-SEA-LION-v4-27B-IT | SEA-LION (AI Singapore) | untested | DOWN | — | ✓ | · | · |
| 0.3 | Meta-Llama-3.3-70B-Instruct | sambanova | untested | CARD | — | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ |
| 0.2 | 01-ai/yi-large | nvidia | untested | DOWN | — | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ |
| 1.2 | cohere/north-mini-code:free | openrouter | yes | FREE | 3/5 | ✗ | ✓ | ✓ |
| 0.3 | DeepSeek-V3.1 | sambanova | untested | CARD | — | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ |
| 0.2 | adept/fuyu-8b | nvidia | untested | DOWN | — | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ |
| 1.7 | dots-studio/dots-3-note-preview:free | openrouter | yes | FREE | 3/5 | ✗ | ✓ | ✓ |
| 0.3 | DeepSeek-V3.2 | sambanova | untested | CARD | — | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ |
| 0.2 | ai21labs/jamba-1.5-large-instruct | nvidia | untested | DOWN | — | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ |
| 0.4 | google/gemma-4-26b-a4b-it:free | openrouter | yes (past) | DOWN | — | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ |
| 0.3 | Meta-Llama-3.3-70B-Instruct | sambanova | untested | CARD | — | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ |
| 0.2 | aisingapore/sea-lion-7b-instruct | nvidia | untested | DOWN | — | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ |
| 0.3 | google/gemma-4-31b-it:free | openrouter | yes (past) | DOWN | — | ✗ | ✗ | ✓ |
| 0.3 | MiniMax-M2.7 | sambanova | untested | CARD | — | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ |
| 0.1 | bigcode/starcoder2-15b | nvidia | untested | DOWN | — | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ |
| 0.8 | inclusionai/ling-3.0-flash-fin:free | openrouter | yes | FREE | 3/5 | ✗ | ✓ | ✓ |
| 0.3 | MiniMax-M3 | sambanova | untested | CARD | — | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ |
| 0.2 | databricks/dbrx-instruct | nvidia | untested | DOWN | — | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ |
| 0.9 | inclusionai/ling-3.0-flash-sante:free | openrouter | yes | FREE | 3/5 | ✗ | ✓ | · |
| 0.3 | gemma-4-31B-it | sambanova | untested | CARD | — | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ |
| 0.2 | deepseek-ai/deepseek-coder-6.7b-instruct | nvidia | untested | DOWN | — | · | ✗ | ✗ |
| 1.0 | inclusionai/ling-3.0-flash-vl:free | openrouter | yes | FREE | 3/5 | · | ✓ | · |