Stop Paying For AI...Do This Instead!

**Julian Goldie** (0:00)
Today, we're going to be looking at this new trending GitHub that gives you a list of free APIs so that you can learn and build with AI free forever. So what this does, it breaks down all of the latest free providers, and then you get a full list of everything that you can use for free. So for example, we have a look at OpenRouter, and you're wondering, okay, what models could I use for free with OpenRouter? Well, there's actually a list of all of them right here, which is super useful. So for example, if we go to this model right here, it actually links directly to it inside OpenRouter, which is super useful. So for example, we can go to Hermes, and there's a few ways you could use this free model. But the main point is you could plug it into your agents, you could plug it into free Claude Code, you could use the API, you could even, for example, start using it directly inside the chat here. So the great thing about this is, not a lot of people, they don't have the resources, or they're using a lot of tasks with AI agents, they want to keep the costs down. This is a great way to just reduce that. So if you have a look at this model, you might be wondering, okay, well, how do you start using it? Well, number one, you can go inside the playground here and you can start typing and talking directly to it.
Or what you can actually do is you could plug this into your agent operating system as well. So if we have a look at this model, Hermes 345B Instruct, if you go inside Hermes and we type Hermes model inside the terminal here, we can switch the model provider to OpenRouter, plug in your API key, and then you can select the free APIs you want to use, as you can see right here. So we've got three different free APIs that we've already plugged in to OpenRouter, or what we can actually do is we can enter a custom model name, grab the details of that model, plug it in here, and now the default model has been changed. So now next time we use Hermes, the model is changed to the free one, and we can go from there. Pretty amazing stuff.
So you can use this model directly on OpenRouter. You can use the API key inside your coding model. The other thing that you could do, for example, is you could go inside free Claude Code. So we've got free Claude Code plugged in here, and we could use a free API directly with free Claude Code inside our agent factory. We've currently got a free local model called agents A1, but we could actually switch the API to Hermes or whatever we want to use as well, previously. One thing to note, just want to be 100 transparent with you, is that you see here, it says Hermes three and four models are not agentic. So if you are using models that are free like this, just make sure that you select an agentic one.
That's designed for tool use. Otherwise, the model won't work that well. So for example, like A1 itself is designed for agents. It's a free local model you can use. It's pretty fast and easy to apply. And it can build pretty nice stuff, as you can see right here. But the main point here is like, there's many different ways up the mountain to use free APIs. And you've got an awesome setup where you can switch between them. So there's a bunch of others on here. So for example, OpenRouter, each one of these will link directly to the free model. And then there's like different setups. So for example, you've got OpenRouter, you've got Google AI Studio with a list of free APIs. We have, for example, NVIDIA, Mistral, and these are all free providers. Now on top of that, we've also got broken down here is providers with trials. So these are kind of like ones where you can just test out, see what you think. Pretty reasonable to test out and then from there, you can always cancel later if you want to. There's three different tiers here. You've got free tiers with the cloud APIs. You have the trials that we talked about a minute ago, and then we also have local models.
So for example, I was showing you A1 before. We can build stuff with these local models and they're pretty decent. Like I've tested out loads of different local models inside our Goldie bench leaderboard. So far, Quable is winning out of all of them, but agents A1 was pretty decent when we tested it as well.