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awesome-free-models

Project Url: 12britz/awesome-free-models

Introduction: A curated list of free AI models, APIs, and tools you can use without paying a cent.

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Running AI shouldn't require a credit card. This list curates genuinely free models — open-weight models you can self-host, free API tiers from major providers, and tools to run everything locally.

🧠 Open-Weight Models

Notable open-weight models you can download and run on your own hardware.

Llama 4 Scout / Maverick — Meta's latest MoE generation. Scout: 109B, 10M context. Maverick: 402B, 1M context. Native multimodal. [License]
DeepSeek V4 — Latest generation with extreme cost-efficiency. MIT license.
DeepSeek-V4-Flash — Apr 2026. Efficiency-focused variant of DeepSeek V4. 1M token context, optimized for fast inference. MIT license.
Gemma 4 31B / 26B MoE / E4B / E2B — Fully permissive Apache 2.0. 256K context, native multimodal. New standard for open-weight.
GLM-5.1 (Zhipu AI) — 744B MoE model, competitive with top proprietary models. MIT license.
MiniMax M3 — Frontier-tier 1M context, native multimodal + computer use. MSA architecture.
Trinity (Arcee AI) — 400B parameter enterprise model. Apache 2.0.
Step 3.7 Flash (StepFun) — May 2026. Apache 2.0. Native multimodal (image+video), strong agentic performance. Efficient enough for high-end local hardware.
Kimi K2.6 (Moonshot AI) — Apr 2026. 1T-parameter MoE model. Modified MIT license. Exceptional coding (SWE-Bench ~54%) and multi-agent swarm orchestration.
Qwen 3.6-35B-A3B — Apr 2026. MoE variant with only 3B active parameters. Extremely efficient for consumer hardware. Apache 2.0.
InternLM 3 (Shanghai AI Lab) — Early 2026. Strong long-context reasoning and agentic performance. Competitive in open-weight benchmarks.
MiMo-V2.5-Pro (Xiaomi) — Apr 2026. 1.02T-parameter MoE (42B active). Optimized for complex agentic tasks, coding, and long-context.
Bonsai 8B (PrismML) — Apr 2026. Groundbreaking 1-bit quantized model. Extremely efficient for edge and consumer hardware (Apple Silicon).
Mistral Small 3.1 (Mistral) — Mar 2025. Versatile 24B multimodal model. Strong text performance with native image understanding and 128K context. Apache 2.0.
Mistral Small 4 (Mistral) — Mar 2026. Hybrid MoE (6.5B active params) unifying instruction, reasoning, and multimodal capabilities. Efficient frontier-class model. Apache 2.0.
Command A+ (Cohere) — May 2026. Enterprise multimodal MoE optimized for sovereignty and multilingual RAG across 48 languages. Apache 2.0.
Hermes 4 (NousResearch) — Feb 2026. Self-improving agentic model with closed-loop learning. Curates own memory and builds skills from experience. Apache 2.0.
Snowflake Arctic — Apr 2024. Enterprise MoE model balancing high-quality performance with efficient training costs. Optimized for complex data operations. Apache 2.0.
Falcon 3 (TII) — Dec 2024. Compact high-performance model with strong reasoning. Designed for efficient deployment on resource-constrained hardware. TII Falcon-LLM License 2.0.
Apple OpenELM — Apr 2024. Family of efficient on-device SLMs using layer-wise attention scaling. Runs locally on Apple Silicon with full privacy. Apple Sample Code License.

🔌 Free API Providers

Providers offering free tiers to access models via API — no local hardware required.

Google AI Studio — Most generous free tier. Access Gemini 2.5 Flash, Gemini 2.0 Flash, and other models. Generous rate limits for prototyping.
OpenRouter — Aggregates 500+ models. Filter by "Free" to see models available at no cost. Includes experimental and subsidized open-weight models.
AnyAPI — 400+ models with OpenAI-compatible API. Free tier: 100K tokens/day, unlimited users. Includes free and basic models. No credit card required.
Groq — Ultra-fast inference. Free tier includes Llama, Gemma, Mixtral, Whisper models with generous daily rate limits.
Hugging Face Inference Providers — Free tier for thousands of community models. Rate-limited but excellent for testing.
NVIDIA NIM — Free API access to accelerated versions of Llama, Mistral, Gemma, and more on NVIDIA infrastructure.
DeepInfra — Serverless inference. Free tier with daily rate limits for popular open-source models.
Together AI — Free trial credits for new users. Fast inference on open-source models.
Fireworks AI — Free tier for community models. Optimized for low latency.
SiliconFlow — Rising platform with free access to many open-source models.
Cloudflare Workers AI — Free tier for running select open-source models at the edge.
Replicate — Free tier with limited credits for running open-source models.
Poe (Quora) — Free tier with daily credits for GPT-4 mini, Claude instant, and community bots.
Qwen Studio (Alibaba) — Free access to Qwen 3.6-Plus, Qwen 3.6-Max, and other Qwen models via web chat and API. 1M token context for agentic coding.
Ollama Cloud — Free tier for running open-source models on Ollama's cloud infrastructure. Light usage with session limits (reset every 5 hours) and weekly limits. 1 concurrent model. Same ollama run command as local. Prompt/response data never logged or trained on.
Mistral AI (La Plateforme) — Free API tier with access to Mistral Large, Mistral Nemo, Codestral and more. 1 req/s, 500k tokens/min. Requires phone verification and data usage opt-in.
Cohere — Free evaluation API key for Command R, Command R+, Embed, and Rerank models. 20 req/min, 1,000 req/month.
DeepSeek Platform — Free API credits for new users (5M tokens). Access to DeepSeek V4, DeepSeek-R1, and other models. Generous free allocation.
GitHub Models — Free tier for GitHub users. Access GPT-4o, Llama 3.3, Mistral, and more with rate-limited playground and API.
Hyperbolic — Open-access AI cloud with affordable inference. Free compute credits via referral program. Supports Llama, Qwen, DeepSeek, and other open models.
Novita AI — Free credits for testing 100+ models including Llama, Qwen, DeepSeek, and Mistral. OpenAI-compatible API with competitive pricing beyond the free tier.
Anakin.ai — 30 daily free credits for accessing multiple AI models. Web chat interface and API access. Supports GPT-4, Claude, and open-weight models.
Nebius AI — $100 free credits for new users. AI Studio with access to Llama, Qwen, DeepSeek, and other open-weight models. Fast inference on NVIDIA H100 infrastructure.
Fal.ai — Free starter credits for AI inference. Fast, serverless platform supporting Llama, Flux, and Stable Diffusion models. Pay-as-you-go beyond free tier.
Vercel AI Gateway — $5/month free credits for the AI Gateway. Proxy and cache requests across multiple LLM providers. SDK is open-source and free.
AI21 Labs — $10 trial credits for accessing Jamba 1.5, Jamba 1.6, and other AI21 models. Valid for 3 months. Requires account sign-up.
Amazon Bedrock — $200 AWS credits for new customers. Access to Llama, Mistral, Claude, Titan, and other foundation models via API.
Microsoft Foundry (Azure) — $200 free trial credits (30 days). Access GPT-4o, Llama, Mistral, Phi, and other models via Azure's unified AI platform.
RunPod — Free credits for serverless GPU inference. Deploy open-weight models as serverless endpoints. Supports Llama, Qwen, DeepSeek, and more.

💻 Local Inference Tools

Run models on your own machine — no API keys needed, full privacy.

Ollama — The easiest way to run local LLMs. One command to download and run any model. macOS, Linux, Windows. GitHub
LM Studio — Polished desktop GUI. Browse, download, and chat with models. Built-in model browser and local API server.
llama.cpp — High-performance C++ inference engine. Runs on CPU and GPU. Supports GGUF quantization. Powers most other local tools.
Jan — Open-source ChatGPT alternative for desktop. Built-in model downloader, local API server. GitHub
GPT4All — Privacy-focused local chatbot. Runs on consumer hardware. Built-in model browser. Note: Last release Feb 2025. Consider newer alternatives. GitHub
text-generation-webui (Oobabooga) — Feature-rich web UI. Supports multiple backends (Transformers, llama.cpp, ExLlama, AutoGPTQ).
LocalAI — Drop-in OpenAI API replacement. Run models locally with an OpenAI-compatible API. GitHub
KoboldCPP — Single-file executable for running GGUF models. Focused on story generation but general-purpose.
llamafile (Mozilla) — Distributable single-file executables that run LLMs. No installation needed.
vLLM — High-throughput production inference engine. Uses PagedAttention for efficient serving.
SGLang — Fast inference framework with structured generation and RadixAttention.
TensorRT-LLM (NVIDIA) — NVIDIA's optimized inference engine. Best performance on NVIDIA GPUs.
ExLlamaV3 — Optimized inference for Llama-family models. Successor to ExLlamaV2. Fastest option for single-GPU inference.
Aphrodite Engine — High-performance LLM serving engine with advanced quantization support.
TabbyAPI — Lightweight, fast OpenAI-compatible API server for ExLlamaV2.
LlamaEdge — Lightweight inference framework for edge devices. OpenAI-compatible API for open-source models. Runs on WasmEdge for portability. GitHub
MLC LLM — Universal deployment engine by UW/SJTU. Runs LLMs on any hardware — laptops, phones, browsers. OpenAI-compatible API.
WebLLM — In-browser LLM inference via WebGPU. Runs models directly in your browser with zero setup. No server needed.
FastChat (LMSYS) — Open platform for training, serving, and evaluating LLMs. Provides OpenAI-compatible API and web UI for local models.
Hugging Face TGI — Production-grade serving toolkit for large language models. Optimized for high throughput on local hardware. Note: Archived Mar 2026, maintenance mode. Consider vLLM or SGLang.
DeepSpeed (Microsoft) — Deep learning optimization library with inference acceleration. Enables running larger models on limited hardware through ZeRO optimization.
AirLLM — Run large models (70B+) on consumer hardware with limited memory. Loads models layer-by-layer for extreme memory efficiency.
AI Toolkit for VS Code (Microsoft) — VS Code extension to browse, test, fine-tune, and deploy models locally. Integrates ONNX and llama.cpp.
Ollama Grid Search — Desktop utility for systematic model evaluation. Test multiple models, prompts, and inference parameters side-by-side via a Rust/React GUI.

💬 AI Chatbot UIs

Free, open-source web interfaces for chatting with AI models — self-host or use hosted versions.

Open WebUI — Feature-rich ChatGPT-like interface for Ollama and OpenAI-compatible backends. RAG, image generation, multi-user. GitHub
LibreChat — Open-source ChatGPT clone supporting 40+ providers, multi-user, plugins, and RAG. Note: Acquired by ClickHouse. GitHub
AnythingLLM — All-in-one desktop app for chatting with documents and models. Built-in RAG pipeline. GitHub
Big-AGI — Feature-rich AI chat with personas, multi-model support, voice, and code execution. GitHub
Lobe Chat — Multi-agent orchestration platform with plugin system and multi-provider support. GitHub

🤖 AI Coding Assistants

Free tools that integrate AI into your development workflow.

Continue.dev — Acquired by Cursor. Open-source AI code assistant for VS Code and JetBrains. GitHub
Aider — AI pair programming in the terminal. Edits code in your local git repo. Supports GPT, Claude, and local models. GitHub
Tabby — Self-hosted AI coding assistant with no dependency on external services. GitHub
Cody (Sourcegraph) — Free tier for individuals. Chat, autocomplete, and commands with codebase context.
Llama Coder (Nutlope) — Free AI code generation tool. Generate entire apps from prompts.
Bolt.new (StackBlitz) — Free tier for AI-powered full-stack web app development in browser.
Claude Code (Anthropic) — Terminal-based AI coding assistant. Most features require a Claude subscription or API credits. Limited free usage via terminal CLI.
Cursor 3 — Apr 2026. AI-native code editor with deep model integration and agentic features. Free tier available.
CodeBuff — CLI-based AI coding assistant that understands entire codebases. Multi-agent architecture, works with any model provider through natural language instructions.
Pi — Open-source terminal AI coding agent with a unified multi-provider API. Model-agnostic, supports OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and any OpenAI-compatible endpoint. Extensible plugin architecture. GitHub
Cline — Popular autonomous VS Code agent. Creates/edits files, runs terminal commands, browses web. Open-source, BYOK (bring your own API key). GitHub
OpenHands — Autonomous AI software engineer. Navigates file systems, runs shell commands, tests code in browser. Self-hostable. GitHub
Goose — Open-source CLI agent for complex software engineering tasks. Extensible plugin system. Built by Block/Square. GitHub

📝 Code Models

Specialized for code generation, completion, and analysis.

MAI-Code-1-Flash (Microsoft) — Jun 2026. Microsoft's open-weight coding model for lowering infrastructure costs.
DeepSeek Coder — State-of-the-art open-weight code generation. DeepSeek's coder series leads SWE-bench. MIT license.
Qwen2.5-Coder (Alibaba) — Highly capable code model series (1.5B–32B). Excellent balance of speed and quality. Apache 2.0.
Codestral (Mistral) — Mistral's dedicated code generation model — fill-in-the-middle, completion, and instruction.
CodeGemma (Google) — Google's Gemma architecture fine-tuned for code completion and instruction. Apache 2.0.
StarCoder2 (BigCode) — Transparently trained code model covering 619 languages. OpenRAIL-M license.
Yi-Coder (01.AI) — Efficient coding model with strong long-context understanding. Yi License (Apache 2.0 compatible).
Granite Code (IBM) — IBM's enterprise-grade code model, available in multiple sizes. Apache 2.0.
Phi-4-mini (Microsoft) — Lightweight model optimized for reasoning and code. Punches above its weight class. MIT license.
Qwen3-Coder-Next (Alibaba) — Early 2026. Latest generation of Qwen's code series. Strong reasoning and long-context coding capabilities. Apache 2.0.
CodeLlama (Meta) — Aug 2023. Llama 2-based code generation pioneer. Supports infilling, completion, and instruction. Llama 2 Community License.
WizardCoder (WizardLM) — 2023. Evol-Instruct fine-tuned for complex coding tasks. Strong general code generation performance. Apache 2.0.
OpenCodeInterpreter — 2024. Integrates execution feedback to iteratively improve generated code. Bridges generation and execution. Apache 2.0.
Stable Code 3B (Stability AI) — Aug 2023. Lightweight 3B code model optimized for fill-in-the-middle. Efficient for local autocompletion. StabilityAI license.
CodeGeeX2 (THUDM) — 2023. Multilingual code model supporting 20+ languages. Strong in both Chinese and English code tasks. Apache 2.0.
CodeT5+ (Salesforce) — 2023. Encoder-decoder architecture unifying code generation, completion, and understanding. BSD-3 license.
SantaCoder (BigCode) — 2023. Light 1.1B model specialized for Python, Java, and JavaScript. Fast and efficient for IDE integration.

🔍 RAG & Vector Databases

Free tools for building retrieval-augmented generation pipelines — vector storage, embedding search, and document retrieval.

Chroma — AI-native open-source embedding database. Runs in-process, no GPU needed. GitHub
Qdrant — High-performance vector search engine. Free tier on Qdrant Cloud or self-host via Docker. GitHub
pgvector — Vector similarity search inside PostgreSQL. Free if you already run Postgres.
LanceDB — Developer-friendly vector database built on Lance columnar format. Runs locally, no server needed. GitHub
Weaviate — Open-source vector database. Free sandbox tier on Weaviate Cloud. GitHub
Milvus (Zilliz) — Cloud-native vector database. Free tier on Zilliz Cloud or self-host. GitHub
txtai — AI-powered semantic search and RAG in a single Python package. GitHub
R2R (SciPhi) — Production-ready RAG engine with API, user management, and observability. Note: Last release Jun 2025. Consider alternatives like Dify or LangGraph.
Docling (IBM) — Document understanding and conversion for RAG pipelines. Extracts PDFs, images, and more. GitHub
Unstructured.io — Preprocessing toolkit for documents (PDF, HTML, Word) for RAG pipelines. Free tier available.

🧩 Agentic Frameworks

Free, open-source frameworks for building AI agents and multi-agent systems.

LangGraph (LangChain) — Low-level framework for building stateful, multi-agent applications. GitHub
CrewAI — Multi-agent framework for orchestrating specialized AI agents to work together. GitHub
AutoGen (Microsoft) — Extensible framework for building multi-agent conversations. Note: In maintenance mode. GitHub
Agno (formerly Phidata) — Full-stack AI framework for building multimodal agents with memory, knowledge, and tools. GitHub
PydanticAI — Agent framework by Pydantic with type-safe outputs and dependency injection. GitHub
Mastra — TypeScript framework for building AI applications and agent workflows. GitHub
OpenAI Agents SDK — Lightweight SDK for building single and multi-agent systems. GitHub
Semantic Kernel (Microsoft) — SDK for orchestrating AI agents with planners, memory, and connectors. GitHub
Dify — LLM app development platform with visual workflow builder and agent capabilities. GitHub
Flowise — Low-code visual LLM flow builder with drag-and-drop interface. Note: Acquired by Workday. GitHub
Smolagents (Hugging Face) — Minimalist agent library where agents "think in code." Lightweight, zero boilerplate. Supports code agents and tool-calling agents.
Swarms — Enterprise-grade multi-agent orchestration framework. Scalable infrastructure for autonomous agent swarms. Highly modular.
Letta (MemGPT) — Framework for long-term agent memory. Virtual memory management that pages data in/out of context like an OS. Persistent agents.
Griptape — Enterprise agent framework with strictly typed Pipelines, Workflows, and Agents. Structure-first, production-ready.
Atomic Agents — Framework inspired by Atomic Design. Compose agents from small, reusable, modular components. Testable and scalable.
PraisonAI — Low-code multi-agent framework. Define agent roles, tasks, and flows via YAML configuration. Wraps underlying agent frameworks.
Cognee — GraphRAG framework for agent knowledge management. Builds interconnected knowledge graphs from unstructured data.
MetaGPT — Multi-agent framework simulating a full software team. Assigns Agent, Product Manager, Engineer roles. Implements SOPs for end-to-end code generation. Note: Last release Apr 2024. Effectively unmaintained.
ChatDev (OpenBMB) — Virtual software company driven by multi-agent collaboration. Follows waterfall model through design, coding, testing, and documentation.
AutoGPT — The original autonomous agent experiment. Sets its own goals, iterates on tasks, and executes without continuous human input. Web browsing and file management.
Bee Agent Framework (IBM) — Production-ready framework for building reliable AI agents in Python and TypeScript. Modular, with built-in observability and IBM research optimizations.
Eliza (elizaOS) — Multi-platform agent framework for creating character-driven AI agents. Handles social media interaction, complex decision-making, and autonomous behavior across platforms.
Qwen-Agent (Alibaba) — Agent framework tightly integrated with the Qwen model family. Optimized for function calling, code execution, RAG, and tool use with Qwen models.
AGiXT — Extensible modular AI agent automation platform. Plugin system for swapping LLMs, memory backends, and tools. Highly customizable agent workflows.

🎛 Fine-tuning Tools

Tools to fine-tune free models on your own data — all free and open-source.

Unsloth — Fast memory-efficient fine-tuning. 2x faster, 50% less memory. Supports QLoRA, LoRA, full fine-tune.
Axolotl — Streamlined fine-tuning framework supporting multiple model architectures and quantization methods.
LLaMA-Factory — Easy-to-use fine-tuning with web UI. Supports 100+ models, multiple training methods.
Hugging Face TRL — Transformer Reinforcement Learning library. SFT, PPO, DPOTrainer, GRPOTrainer for aligning models.
XTuner (InternLM) — Efficient fine-tuning toolkit supporting QLoRA, LoRA, and full fine-tune with multiple model architectures.
Ludwig (Predibase) — Declarative ML framework. Fine-tune models with a simple config file. GitHub

✨ Prompt Engineering Tools

Free tools for testing, managing, and optimizing prompts.

Promptfoo — Acquired by OpenAI. Open-source tool for prompt testing and evaluation. Systematic A/B testing of prompts. GitHub
Fabric (Daniel Miessler) — Open-source framework for augmenting humans with AI. Library of curated prompts (patterns) for common tasks.
LangFuse — Open-source LLM engineering platform with prompt management, versioning, and evaluation. GitHub
DSPy (Stanford) — Framework for algorithmically optimizing LM prompts and weights. GitHub
Agenta — Open-source LLM platform for prompt management, evaluation, and deployment. GitHub

📊 Datasets

Free, open datasets for training, fine-tuning, and evaluating models.

Hugging Face Datasets — The standard hub for open datasets. 150,000+ datasets across all tasks.
The Stack v2 (BigCode) — Large-scale code dataset covering 619 programming languages. Permissive license.
FineWeb (Hugging Face) — High-quality web dataset for LLM pre-training. 15T tokens.
Dolly (Databricks) — 15k instruction-response pairs for fine-tuning. CC-BY-SA.
OpenAssistant Conversations — 160k human-generated assistant conversations. Apache 2.0.
ShareGPT (RyokoAI) — Real user-ChatGPT conversations for fine-tuning.
UltraChat (Sean C.) — 200k multi-turn conversations synthesized by ChatGPT.
No Robots (Hugging Face) — 10k high-quality human-written instructions. Apache 2.0.
MMLU / GSM8K — Standard benchmarks for evaluation.

☁ Model Hosting Platforms

Free platforms that host models — run inference without downloading anything.

Hugging Face Spaces — Free hosting for ML apps (Gradio, Streamlit). Thousands of community demos.
Hugging Face Inference Endpoints (Free Tier) — Deploy models with free trial credits.
Google Colab (Free Tier) — Free GPU (T4, sometimes A100). Perfect for running models and fine-tuning.
Kaggle Notebooks — Free GPU (T4 x2). 30 hours/week. Good for heavier workloads.
Lightning AI Studio — Free tier with GPU access for development and prototyping.
Modal — Free monthly credits for serverless GPU compute.
Replicate (Free Tier) — Free credits for running community models.
Deepnote — Free tier with GPU for data science and ML notebooks.

📚 Learning Resources

Free courses, books, and tutorials for learning AI and LLMs.

Fast.ai — Code-first deep learning education. Practical, free courses from fundamentals to advanced.
Hugging Face NLP Course — Comprehensive free course on transformers, tokenizers, datasets, and deployment.
DeepLearning.AI Short Courses — Free short courses on LLMs, RAG, LangChain, and AI agents.
Full Stack Deep Learning — Free course on ML engineering: training, deploying, and maintaining models.
Andrej Karpathy's Course — From-scratch neural network implementation videos.
Neural Networks: Zero to Hero — YouTube series building neural networks from scratch.
Prompt Engineering Guide (DAIR.AI) — Comprehensive free guide on prompt engineering techniques.
Anthropic Cookbook — Free recipes and patterns for working with Claude.
OpenAI Cookbook — Free examples and guides for the OpenAI API.

🏆 Resources & Leaderboards

Perplexity — Free AI search and research assistant with real-time answers and source citations.
Hugging Face Open LLM Leaderboard — The primary benchmark for open-weight models. Updated regularly.
LMSYS Chatbot Arena — Human preference rankings of models. Best source for real-world quality comparisons.
Artificial Analysis — Independent benchmarks for speed, pricing, and quality across providers.
Hugging Face Models — Search 1M+ models. Filter by license, task, framework.
OpenRouter Models — Browse models available via API with pricing and free tiers.
Ollama Library — Browse models available for one-command local setup.
cheahjs/free-llm-api-resources — Community-maintained list of free LLM API resources.