Back to articles
I built an OpenAI-compatible gateway that routes across 5 free LLM providers

I built an OpenAI-compatible gateway that routes across 5 free LLM providers

via Dev.toDevansh

Every LLM provider has a free tier. Groq gives you 30 requests per minute. Gemini gives you 15. Cerebras gives you 30. Mistral gives you 5. Combined, that's about 80 requests per minute. Enough for prototyping, internal tools, and side projects where you don't want to pay for API access yet. The problem: each provider has its own SDK, its own rate limits, its own auth, and its own downtime. You end up writing provider-switching logic, catching 429 errors, and managing API keys across five different dashboards. I got tired of this while building Metis , an AI stock analysis tool. Kept hitting Groq's limits while Gemini had capacity sitting idle. So I built FreeLLM. What FreeLLM does One endpoint. Five providers. Twenty models. All free. curl http://localhost:3000/v1/chat/completions \ -d '{"model": "free-fast", "messages": [{"role": "user", "content": "Hello!"}]}' Your existing OpenAI SDK code works. Just change the base URL. That's the whole migration. How the routing works When a requ

Continue reading on Dev.to

Opens in a new tab

Read Full Article
2 views

Related Articles