Free models on OpenRouter

[WillScarlettOhara]

Hello, why can't I use the free models offered by OpenRouter?

Thank you.

[hydropix]

Free LLMs rarely work on OpenRouter and have very limited functionality. That’s why I’ve removed them from the dropdown list. I’ll check to see if they’re still just as unusable.

[WillScarlettOhara]

Hello,
I managed to translate two-thirds of a book with a free model on OpenRouter by adding it manually.

[hydropix]

Hi @WillScarlettOhara, your manual workaround pushed me to retest. You were right, free models do work for sequential translation. I just pushed a fix in v1.0.23.

Three bugs were stacked. The :free filter was too aggressive and is now removed. The 429 retry logic was reading Retry-After (which OpenRouter doesn't send for free tier) and falling back to a backoff too short to outlast the 60s window, it now reads X-RateLimit-Reset properly. And a Windows-only silent failure where emojis in print() crashed on cp1252 consoles, the UnicodeEncodeError was swallowed by a broad except and the request looked failed. That last one might be why free models seemed broken to some users.

In the dropdown, free models now show with a (free, 20 req/min) label and are sorted at the bottom so they don't push paid choices down. Note that the 20 req/min limit is shared across all :free models on your account, so sequential is fine but parallel runs will hit it fast.

Let me know if it works on your side, I'll close once confirmed.

[WillScarlettOhara]

Hi, I won't have time to test this. Thanks btw