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This space moves fast so some info might already be outdated — honestly one of the main reasons I’m posting here is to get suggestions on: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
boreganteng@reddit
Awesome! Good list
Silly-Effort-6843@reddit
Quick context: I'm currently working on a multidatabase data agent (PostgreSQL + MongoDB + DuckDB) for the DataAgentBench benchmark, so I scanned your list through that lens.
Two things that stood out:
• Seeing genai-toolbox (Google MCP Toolbox) listed we're using this as our standard interface layer and it's been solid for abstracting query dialects across DB types.
• The RAG section has good coverage, but I'd love to see more tools focused on evaluation of RAG/agent pipelines (e.g., tools that trace tool calls, score pass@1 against held-out queries, or detect silent join failures). We built a lightweight harness using the Sentinel pattern from a prior project, but curious if others have open-sourced something more general.
One question for you / the community:
Have you come across any OSS tools that specifically help with ill-formatted join key resolution across heterogeneous databases? (e.g., auto-detecting that customer_id = 12345 in PostgreSQL should match "CUST-00123" in MongoDB). This is a huge pain point in enterprise data work and most benchmarks gloss over it but it's where agents silently fail in production.
Suggestion for the repo:
Consider adding a small "Evaluation & Testing" category. Tools like:
DataAgentBench (arxiv.org/html/2603.20576) benchmark for realistic multiDB agent workloads
promptfoo or langsmith for trace-based evaluation
Simple harness templates that output {answer, query_trace, confidence}
Happy to PR a few additions if helpful. Also, if anyone's working on multidatabase agent tooling and wants to compare notes on failure modes, I'm around.
brwinfart@reddit
Thank you
sgamer@reddit
Dyad.sh is a very good vibe coding harness/ide, and works well with local models.
jannemansonh@reddit
Awesome list! If anyone here is experimenting with chaining LLMs or building agentic workflows, I've found Needle.app super handy for connecting different tools and APIs with natural language prompts. Makes it easy to prototype agent stacks without a ton of custom code. Worth a look if you're exploring new ways to automate stuff: https://needle.app
ihppxng62020@reddit
awesome resource! but i really need a recipe for chocolate cake right now
jannemansonh@reddit
Sure here you go: hahaha
Look_0ver_There@reddit
Where's OpenCode and ForgeCode? OhMyPi? Aider? Goose? RooCode? Even ClaudeCode itself can be run with Open source models.
Axintwo@reddit (OP)
oh shi I thought i did add opencode and aider. I will add by today
total-context64k@reddit
You added my harnesses and then removed them? Why would you do that? LOL
beef-ox@reddit
I would add Claude code with the necessary environment variables to run local models bundled with QuantFlow Pilot, ForgeCode, and MemoryPalace by Mika Jovavich
total-context64k@reddit
CLIO should be on this list.
Axintwo@reddit (OP)
will add by today