Curated 550+ free LLM tools for builders (APIs, local models, RAG, agents, IDEs)

Posted by Axintwo@reddit | LocalLLaMA | View on Reddit | 13 comments

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This space moves fast so some info might already be outdated — honestly one of the main reasons I’m posting here is to get suggestions on: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