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Collections/Free Models

Free AI Models on OpenRouter

Model rankings updated March 2026 based on real usage data.

At OpenRouter, we believe that free models play a crucial role in democratizing access to AI. These models allow hundreds of thousands of users worldwide to experiment, learn, and innovate. Below you will find the top free AI models currently available on OpenRouter.

We are continuing to actively expand our free model capacity by onboarding new providers and directly covering costs to help promote freely accessible models. While we can't guarantee what the future holds, we will continue to support free inference options on our platform.

For the simplest way to get started, try openrouter/free, a router that automatically selects from available free models based on your request's requirements.

Top Free Models on OpenRouter

Favicon for arcee-ai

Arcee AI: Trinity Large Preview (free)

582B tokens

Trinity-Large-Preview is a frontier-scale open-weight language model from Arcee, built as a 400B-parameter sparse Mixture-of-Experts with 13B active parameters per token using 4-of-256 expert routing.

It excels in creative writing, storytelling, role-play, chat scenarios, and real-time voice assistance, better than your average reasoning model usually can. But we’re also introducing some of our newer agentic performance. It was trained to navigate well in agent harnesses like OpenCode, Cline, and Kilo Code, and to handle complex toolchains and long, constraint-filled prompts.

The architecture natively supports very long context windows up to 512k tokens, with the Preview API currently served at 128k context using 8-bit quantization for practical deployment. Trinity-Large-Preview reflects Arcee’s efficiency-first design philosophy, offering a production-oriented frontier model with open weights and permissive licensing suitable for real-world applications and experimentation.

by arcee-ai131K context$0/M input tokens$0/M output tokens
Favicon for stepfun

StepFun: Step 3.5 Flash (free)

481B tokens

Step 3.5 Flash is StepFun's most capable open-source foundation model. Built on a sparse Mixture of Experts (MoE) architecture, it selectively activates only 11B of its 196B parameters per token. It is a reasoning model that is incredibly speed efficient even at long contexts.

by stepfun256K context$0/M input tokens$0/M output tokens
Favicon for z-ai

Z.ai: GLM 4.5 Air (free)

61.4B tokens

GLM-4.5-Air is the lightweight variant of our latest flagship model family, also purpose-built for agent-centric applications. Like GLM-4.5, it adopts the Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture but with a more compact parameter size. GLM-4.5-Air also supports hybrid inference modes, offering a "thinking mode" for advanced reasoning and tool use, and a "non-thinking mode" for real-time interaction. Users can control the reasoning behaviour with the reasoning enabled boolean. Learn more in our docs

by z-ai131K context$0/M input tokens$0/M output tokens
Favicon for nvidia

NVIDIA: Nemotron 3 Nano 30B A3B (free)

31.4B tokens

NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Nano 30B A3B is a small language MoE model with highest compute efficiency and accuracy for developers to build specialized agentic AI systems.

The model is fully open with open-weights, datasets and recipes so developers can easily customize, optimize, and deploy the model on their infrastructure for maximum privacy and security.

by nvidia256K context$0/M input tokens$0/M output tokens
Favicon for qwen

Qwen: Qwen3 VL 235B A22B Thinking

23.7B tokens

Qwen3-VL-235B-A22B Thinking is a multimodal model that unifies strong text generation with visual understanding across images and video. The Thinking model is optimized for multimodal reasoning in STEM and math. The series emphasizes robust perception (recognition of diverse real-world and synthetic categories), spatial understanding (2D/3D grounding), and long-form visual comprehension, with competitive results on public multimodal benchmarks for both perception and reasoning.

Beyond analysis, Qwen3-VL supports agentic interaction and tool use: it can follow complex instructions over multi-image, multi-turn dialogues; align text to video timelines for precise temporal queries; and operate GUI elements for automation tasks. The models also enable visual coding workflows, turning sketches or mockups into code and assisting with UI debugging, while maintaining strong text-only performance comparable to the flagship Qwen3 language models. This makes Qwen3-VL suitable for production scenarios spanning document AI, multilingual OCR, software/UI assistance, spatial/embodied tasks, and research on vision-language agents.

by qwen131K context$0/M input tokens$0/M output tokens
Favicon for qwen

Qwen: Qwen3 235B A22B Thinking 2507

20.4B tokens

Qwen3-235B-A22B-Thinking-2507 is a high-performance, open-weight Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) language model optimized for complex reasoning tasks. It activates 22B of its 235B parameters per forward pass and natively supports up to 262,144 tokens of context. This "thinking-only" variant enhances structured logical reasoning, mathematics, science, and long-form generation, showing strong benchmark performance across AIME, SuperGPQA, LiveCodeBench, and MMLU-Redux. It enforces a special reasoning mode (</think>) and is designed for high-token outputs (up to 81,920 tokens) in challenging domains.

The model is instruction-tuned and excels at step-by-step reasoning, tool use, agentic workflows, and multilingual tasks. This release represents the most capable open-source variant in the Qwen3-235B series, surpassing many closed models in structured reasoning use cases.

by qwen131K context$0/M input tokens$0/M output tokens
Favicon for qwen

Qwen: Qwen3 VL 30B A3B Thinking

9.93B tokens

Qwen3-VL-30B-A3B-Thinking is a multimodal model that unifies strong text generation with visual understanding for images and videos. Its Thinking variant enhances reasoning in STEM, math, and complex tasks. It excels in perception of real-world/synthetic categories, 2D/3D spatial grounding, and long-form visual comprehension, achieving competitive multimodal benchmark results. For agentic use, it handles multi-image multi-turn instructions, video timeline alignments, GUI automation, and visual coding from sketches to debugged UI. Text performance matches flagship Qwen3 models, suiting document AI, OCR, UI assistance, spatial tasks, and agent research.

by qwen131K context$0/M input tokens$0/M output tokens
Favicon for arcee-ai

Arcee AI: Trinity Mini (free)

6.13B tokens

Trinity Mini is a 26B-parameter (3B active) sparse mixture-of-experts language model featuring 128 experts with 8 active per token. Engineered for efficient reasoning over long contexts (131k) with robust function calling and multi-step agent workflows.

by arcee-ai131K context$0/M input tokens$0/M output tokens
Favicon for nvidia

NVIDIA: Nemotron Nano 9B V2 (free)

4.83B tokens

NVIDIA-Nemotron-Nano-9B-v2 is a large language model (LLM) trained from scratch by NVIDIA, and designed as a unified model for both reasoning and non-reasoning tasks. It responds to user queries and tasks by first generating a reasoning trace and then concluding with a final response.

The model's reasoning capabilities can be controlled via a system prompt. If the user prefers the model to provide its final answer without intermediate reasoning traces, it can be configured to do so.

by nvidia128K context$0/M input tokens$0/M output tokens
Favicon for openai

OpenAI: gpt-oss-120b (free)

4.51B tokens

gpt-oss-120b is an open-weight, 117B-parameter Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) language model from OpenAI designed for high-reasoning, agentic, and general-purpose production use cases. It activates 5.1B parameters per forward pass and is optimized to run on a single H100 GPU with native MXFP4 quantization. The model supports configurable reasoning depth, full chain-of-thought access, and native tool use, including function calling, browsing, and structured output generation.

by openai131K context$0/M input tokens$0/M output tokens
Favicon for nvidia

NVIDIA: Nemotron Nano 12B 2 VL (free)

3.7B tokens

NVIDIA Nemotron Nano 2 VL is a 12-billion-parameter open multimodal reasoning model designed for video understanding and document intelligence. It introduces a hybrid Transformer-Mamba architecture, combining transformer-level accuracy with Mamba’s memory-efficient sequence modeling for significantly higher throughput and lower latency.

The model supports inputs of text and multi-image documents, producing natural-language outputs. It is trained on high-quality NVIDIA-curated synthetic datasets optimized for optical-character recognition, chart reasoning, and multimodal comprehension.

Nemotron Nano 2 VL achieves leading results on OCRBench v2 and scores ≈ 74 average across MMMU, MathVista, AI2D, OCRBench, OCR-Reasoning, ChartQA, DocVQA, and Video-MME—surpassing prior open VL baselines. With Efficient Video Sampling (EVS), it handles long-form videos while reducing inference cost.

Open-weights, training data, and fine-tuning recipes are released under a permissive NVIDIA open license, with deployment supported across NeMo, NIM, and major inference runtimes.

by nvidia128K context$0/M input tokens$0/M output tokens
Favicon for meta-llama

Meta: Llama 3.3 70B Instruct (free)

2.54B tokens

The Meta Llama 3.3 multilingual large language model (LLM) is a pretrained and instruction tuned generative model in 70B (text in/text out). The Llama 3.3 instruction tuned text only model is optimized for multilingual dialogue use cases and outperforms many of the available open source and closed chat models on common industry benchmarks.

Supported languages: English, German, French, Italian, Portuguese, Hindi, Spanish, and Thai.

Model Card

by meta-llama128K context$0/M input tokens$0/M output tokens
Favicon for openai

OpenAI: gpt-oss-20b (free)

1.34B tokens

gpt-oss-20b is an open-weight 21B parameter model released by OpenAI under the Apache 2.0 license. It uses a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture with 3.6B active parameters per forward pass, optimized for lower-latency inference and deployability on consumer or single-GPU hardware. The model is trained in OpenAI’s Harmony response format and supports reasoning level configuration, fine-tuning, and agentic capabilities including function calling, tool use, and structured outputs.

by openai131K context$0/M input tokens$0/M output tokens
Favicon for google

Google: Gemma 3 27B (free)

840M tokens

Gemma 3 introduces multimodality, supporting vision-language input and text outputs. It handles context windows up to 128k tokens, understands over 140 languages, and offers improved math, reasoning, and chat capabilities, including structured outputs and function calling. Gemma 3 27B is Google's latest open source model, successor to Gemma 2

by google131K context$0/M input tokens$0/M output tokens
Favicon for qwen

Qwen: Qwen3 Coder 480B A35B (free)

740M tokens

Qwen3-Coder-480B-A35B-Instruct is a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) code generation model developed by the Qwen team. It is optimized for agentic coding tasks such as function calling, tool use, and long-context reasoning over repositories. The model features 480 billion total parameters, with 35 billion active per forward pass (8 out of 160 experts).

Pricing for the Alibaba endpoints varies by context length. Once a request is greater than 128k input tokens, the higher pricing is used.

by qwen262K context$0/M input tokens$0/M output tokens
Favicon for qwen

Qwen: Qwen3 Next 80B A3B Instruct (free)

722M tokens

Qwen3-Next-80B-A3B-Instruct is an instruction-tuned chat model in the Qwen3-Next series optimized for fast, stable responses without “thinking” traces. It targets complex tasks across reasoning, code generation, knowledge QA, and multilingual use, while remaining robust on alignment and formatting. Compared with prior Qwen3 instruct variants, it focuses on higher throughput and stability on ultra-long inputs and multi-turn dialogues, making it well-suited for RAG, tool use, and agentic workflows that require consistent final answers rather than visible chain-of-thought.

The model employs scaling-efficient training and decoding to improve parameter efficiency and inference speed, and has been validated on a broad set of public benchmarks where it reaches or approaches larger Qwen3 systems in several categories while outperforming earlier mid-sized baselines. It is best used as a general assistant, code helper, and long-context task solver in production settings where deterministic, instruction-following outputs are preferred.

by qwen262K context$0/M input tokens$0/M output tokens