I spent the whole day putting together a big list of free or cheap LLM tools that are actually useful if you’re building stuff.
Tried to focus more on local models + dev tools instead of those generic “1000 AI websites” type lists.
It includes:
• local models (Ollama, Qwen, Llama etc)
• free LLM APIs (OpenRouter, Groq, Gemini etc)
• coding IDEs + CLI tools (Cursor, Qwen Code, Gemini CLI etc)
• RAG stack tools (vector DBs, embeddings, frameworks)
• agent frameworks and automation tools
• realtime / speech / image / video APIs
• some ready-to-use stack combos
Main goal was to make something practical so people can experiment or build projects without needing to spend $100-200/month on subscriptions.
Right now it has 550+ items (counting model variants too).
This space moves fast so some info might already be outdated — honestly one of the main reasons I’m posting here is to get suggestions on:
• good local models I might have missed
• OSS tools worth adding
• better RAG tools
• new free inference providers
PRs or corrections are very welcome.
Repo:
https://github.com/ShaikhWarsi/free-ai-tools
If you know something useful that should be in the list, lmk and I’ll add it
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