I use OpenRouter's free tier for all my AI work, and 5 models beat the paid ones: qwen/qwen3-8b for code, z-ai/glm-4.7-flash for writing, minimax/minimax-m2.7 for data analysis, tencent/hy3-preview for chat, and meta/llama-3.3-70b-instruct for research.
The tencent/hy3-preview model is deprecated in May 2026, so I'm switching to qwen3-8b for chat. The free tier has rate limits (10 requests/minute), but it's enough for personal use.
If you're broke, skip the $20/month ChatGPT Plus. OpenRouter's free tier has 150+ models, and most of them are free.
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