Ask HN: Openrouter Free Models
2 spapas82 3 5/26/2025, 6:53:59 AM
Hey friends. It's interesting to me that openrouter offers a bunch of completely free models, for example: https://openrouter.ai/mistralai/devstral-small:free ... What's the point of these models ? Who is hosting them and offering these resources for free? What are the disadvantages of these? I understand that they are not the best but they seem good enough to me. Why would I pay to use the OpenAI API when I can use these for free ?
They also offer free models like Quasar Alpha where they don't disclose who the model provider is. In exchange for you getting a capable model for free they get to log everything to improve upon it before a proper public release. Whatever that means, as I would expect everything and your mother to be logged and used for further training anyway.
> For free models, rate limits are determined by the credits that you have purchased. If you have purchased at least 10 credits, your free model rate limit will be 1000 requests per day. Otherwise, you will be rate limited to 50 free model API requests per day.
"To our knowledge, this provider may use your prompts and completions to train new models."