---
title: "freellmapi: OpenAI-Compatible Proxy for AI Providers"
url: https://stacklist.com/card/0b113ed5-29b9-4754-a10d-ef842880ad61
source_url: "https://github.com/tashfeenahmed/freellmapi?utm_source=sp_auto_dm&utm_referrer=sp_auto_dm&fbclid=PAVERTVgSHRcdleHRuA2FlbQIxMABzcnRjBmFwcF9pZA81NjcwNjczNDMzNTI0MjcAAad2aHfTM6i4piC3lCeDJfArQ2HPGxZ5KEXfGJSj8FgcmLt11odub-EJTsuRRQ_aem_YSazglehFUR_nVkcf0v0TQ"
stack: https://stacklist.com/stack/adf42802-57ae-4bec-810c-7ec6565a3b86
summary: "FreeLLMAPI is an open-source interface that aggregates free tiers from 12+ LLM providers (Google, Groq, Cerebras, SambaNova, NVIDIA, Mistral, and others) behind a single OpenAI-compatible endpoint, providing ~1.3 billion tokens per month. It features automatic provider fallover, per-key rate tracking, encrypted key storage, and a unified API for seamless access to diverse language models."
tags: "llm-api, open-source, multi-provider, openai-compatible, free-tier, api-aggregation, language-models"
key_entities: "FreeLLMAPI (technology), OpenAI (technology), Google (organization), Groq (organization), Cerebras (organization), SambaNova (organization), NVIDIA (organization), Mistral (organization), OpenRouter (organization), GitHub (organization), Cohere (organization), Cloudflare (organization), HuggingFace (organization), Zhipu (organization), LangChain (technology), LlamaIndex (technology), DeepSeek (technology), Llama (technology), Qwen (technology), API-aggregation (concept), rate-limiting (concept), automatic-fallover (concept)"
classification: "reference"
content_hash: "sha256:84bb6fc4aedea3a9304de82ad313ba5ec37b84944a1350dc31ef4d7894cdfa03"
acp_version: "0.2"
token_counts_approximate: 3754
visibility: public
agent_accessible: true
status: "final"
---

# freellmapi: OpenAI-Compatible Proxy for AI Providers

FreeLLMAPI One OpenAI-compatible endpoint. Twelve free LLM providers. ~1B+ tokens per month. Aggregate the free tiers from Google, Groq, Cerebras, SambaNova, NVIDIA, Mistral, OpenRouter, GitHub Models, Cohere, Cloudflare, HuggingFace, and Z.ai (Zhipu) behind a single /v1/chat/completions endpoint. Keys are stored encrypted. A router picks the best available model for each request, falls over to the next provider when one is rate-limited, and tracks per-key usage so you stay under every free-tier cap. Contents Why this exists Supported providers Features Not yet supported Quick start Using the API Screenshots How it works Limitations Contributing Terms of Service review Disclaimer Why this exists Every serious AI lab now offers a free tier — a few million tokens a month, a few thousand requests a day. On its own each tier is a toy. Stacked together, they add up to roughly 1.3 billion tokens per month of working inference capacity, across dozens of models from small-and-fast to reasonably capable. The problem is that stacking them by hand is painful: fourteen different SDKs, fourteen different rate limits, fourteen places a request can fail. FreeLLMAPI collapses that into one OpenAI-compatible endpoint. Point any OpenAI client library at your local server, and it routes transparently across whichever providers you've added keys for. Supported providers Google Gemini 2.5 Flash · 3.x previews Groq Llama 3.3, Llama 4, GPT-OSS, Qwen3 Cerebras Qwen3 235B SambaNova DeepSeek V3.x · Llama 4 · Gemma 3 Mistral Large 3 · Medium 3.5 · Codestral · Devstral OpenRouter 21 free-tier models GitHub Models GPT-4.1 · GPT-4o Cloudflare Kimi K2 · GLM-4.7 · GPT-OSS · Granite 4 Cohere Command R+ · Command-A (trial) Z.ai (Zhipu) GLM-4.5 · GLM-4.7 Flash NVIDIA NIM (disabled by default) HuggingFace Router → DeepSeek V4 · Kimi K2.6 · Qwen3 Features OpenAI-compatible — POST /v1/chat/completions and GET /v1/models work with the official OpenAI SDKs and any OpenAI-compatible client (LangChain, LlamaIndex, Continue, Hermes, etc.). Just change base_url . Streaming and non-streaming — Server-Sent Events for stream: true , JSON response otherwise. Every provider adapter implements both. Tool calling — OpenAI-style tools / tool_choice requests are passed through, and assistant tool_calls + tool role follow-up messages round-trip across providers. Automatic fallover — If the chosen provider returns a 429, 5xx, or times out, the router skips it, puts the key on a short cooldown, and retries on the next model in your fallback chain (up to 20 attempts). Per-key rate tracking — RPM, RPD, TPM, and TPD counters per (platform, model, key) so the router always picks a key that's under its caps. Sticky sessions — Multi-turn conversations keep talking to the same model for 30 minutes to avoid the hallucination spike that comes from mid-conversation model switches. Encrypted key storage — API keys are encrypted with AES-256-GCM before hitting SQLite; decryption happens in-memory just before a request. Unified API key — Clients authenticate to your proxy with a single freellmapi-… bearer token. You never expose upstream provider keys to your apps. Health checks — Periodic probes mark keys as healthy , rate_limited , invalid , or error so the router skips dead ones automatically. Admin dashboard — React + Vite UI to manage keys, reorder the fallback chain, inspect analytics, and run prompts in a playground. Dark mode included. Analytics — Per-request logging with latency, token counts, success rate, and per-provider breakdowns. Runs anywhere Node 20+ runs — Windows, macOS, Linux servers, or a small ARM SBC (Raspberry Pi included). ~40 MB RSS at idle behind PM2 / systemd / whatever supervisor you prefer. Not yet supported The scope is deliberately narrow. If a feature isn't on this list and isn't below, assume it isn't there yet. Embeddings ( /v1/embeddings ) Image generation ( /v1/images/* ) Audio / speech ( /v1/audio/* ) Vision / multimodal inputs — message content is text-only Legacy completions ( /v1/completions ) — only the chat endpoint is implemented Moderation ( /v1/moderations ) n > 1 (multiple completions per request) Per-user billing / multi-tenant auth — single-user by design PRs that add any of these are very welcome. See Contributing . Quick start Prerequisites: Node.js 20+, npm. git clone https://github.com/tashfeenahmed/freellmapi.git cd freellmapi npm install # Generate an encryption key for at-rest key storage cp .env.example .env echo " ENCRYPTION_KEY= $( node -e " console.log(require('crypto').randomBytes(32).toString('hex')) " ) " >> .env # Start server + dashboard together npm run dev ENCRYPTION_KEY is required for startup. The server only falls back to a database-stored development key when DEV_MODE=true and NODE_ENV is not production ; do not use that fallback with real provider keys. Open http://localhost:5173 (the Vite dev UI), add your provider keys on the Keys page, reorder the Fallback Chain to taste, and grab your unified API key from the Keys page header. That unified key is what you point your OpenAI SDK at. For a production build: npm run build node server/dist/index.js # server + dashboard both served on :3001 Using the API Any OpenAI-compatible client works. Examples: Python from openai import OpenAI client = OpenAI ( base_url = "http://localhost:3001/v1" , api_key = "freellmapi-your-unified-key" , ) resp = client . chat . completions . create ( model = "auto" , # let the router pick; or specify e.g. "gemini-2.5-flash" messages = [{ "role" : "user" , "content" : "Summarise the fall of Rome in one sentence." }], ) print ( resp . choices [ 0 ]. message . content ) print ( "Routed via:" , resp . headers . get ( "x-routed-via" )) curl curl http://localhost:3001/v1/chat/completions \ -H " Authorization: Bearer freellmapi-your-unified-key " \ -H " Content-Type: application/json " \ -d ' { "model": "auto", "messages": [{"role": "user", "content": "hi"}] } ' Streaming stream = client . chat . completions . create ( model = "auto" , messages = [{ "role" : "user" , "content" : "Stream me a haiku about SQLite." }], stream = True , ) for chunk in stream : print ( chunk . choices [ 0 ]. delta . content or "" , end = "" , flush = True ) Tool calling Pass OpenAI-style tools and tool_choice ; the assistant response round-trips back through the proxy exactly like the OpenAI API. Multi-step flows (assistant tool_calls → tool role follow-up → final answer) work across every provider the router can reach. tools = [{ "type" : "function" , "function" : { "name" : "get_weather" , "description" : "Get current weather for a city." , "parameters" : { "type" : "object" , "properties" : { "city" : { "type" : "string" }}, "required" : [ "city" ], }, }, }] # 1. Model asks for a tool call first = client . chat . completions . create ( model = "auto" , messages = [{ "role" : "user" , "content" : "What's the weather in Karachi?" }], tools = tools , tool_choice = "required" , ) call = first . choices [ 0 ]. message . tool_calls [ 0 ] # 2. You execute the tool, feed the result back final = client . chat . completions . create ( model = "auto" , messages = [ { "role" : "user" , "content" : "What's the weather in Karachi?" }, first . choices [ 0 ]. message , { "role" : "tool" , "tool_call_id" : call . id , "content" : '{"temp_c": 32, "cond": "sunny"}' }, ], tools = tools , ) print ( final . choices [ 0 ]. message . content ) Works with stream=True as well — you'll get delta.tool_calls chunks followed by a finish_reason: "tool_calls" close. Under the hood, OpenAI-compatible providers (Groq, Cerebras, SambaNova, Mistral, OpenRouter, GitHub Models, HuggingFace, Cloudflare, Cohere compat) get the request passed through; Gemini requests get translated into Google's functionDeclarations / functionResponse shape and the response is translated back. Every response carries an X-Routed-Via: <platform>/<model> header so you can see which provider actually served each call. If a request fell over between providers, you'll also see X-Fallback-Attempts: N . Screenshots Keys Manage provider credentials and grab the unified API key your apps connect with. Each key shows a status dot and when it was last health-checked. Playground Send a chat completion through the router and see which provider served it, with the model ID and latency printed right on the message. Analytics Request volume, success rate, tokens in and out, average latency, and per-provider breakdowns over 24h / 7d / 30d windows. How it works ┌──────────────────┐ Bearer freellmapi-… ┌─────────────────────────┐ │ OpenAI SDK / │ ──────────────────────▶ │ Express proxy (:3001) │ │ curl / any │ ◀────────────────────── │ /v1/chat/completions │ │ OpenAI client │ streamed tokens └────────────┬────────────┘ └──────────────────┘ │ ▼ ┌────────────────────────────────────────────────┐ │ Router │ │ 1. Pick highest-priority model that │ │ (a) has a healthy key and │ │ (b) is under all its rate limits. │ │ 2. Decrypt key, call provider SDK. │ │ 3. On 429/5xx → cooldown + retry next model. │ └────────────────────────────────────────────────┘ │ ┌──────────────┬────────────┬──────────┴─────────┬─────────────┬──────────┐ ▼ ▼ ▼ ▼ ▼ ▼ Google Groq Cerebras OpenRouter HF …10 more Router ( server/src/services/router.ts ) — picks a model per request. Rate-limit ledger ( server/src/services/ratelimit.ts ) — in-memory RPM/RPD/TPM/TPD counters backed by SQLite, with cooldowns on 429s. Provider adapters ( server/src/providers/*.ts ) — one file per provider, implementing the Provider base class: chatCompletion() and streamChatCompletion() . Health service ( server/src/services/health.ts ) — periodic probe keeps key status fresh. Dashboard ( client/ ) — React + Vite + shadcn/ui admin surface. Storage — SQLite ( better-sqlite3 ) with AES-256-GCM envelope encryption for keys. Limitations Stacking free tiers has real trade-offs. Be honest with yourself about them: No frontier models. The free-tier catalog tops out around Llama 3.3 70B, GLM-4.5, Qwen 3 Coder, and Gemini 2.5 Pro. You will not get GPT-5 or Claude Opus class reasoning through this. For hard problems, pay for a real API. Intelligence degrades as the day progresses. Your top-ranked models (usually Gemini 2.5 Pro, GPT-4o via GitHub Models) have the lowest daily caps. Once they hit their limits, the router falls down your priority chain to smaller/weaker models. Expect the effective intelligence of the endpoint to drop in the late hours of each day — then reset at UTC midnight. Latency is highly variable. Cerebras and Groq are extremely fast; others are not. You get whichever one is available. Free tiers can change without notice. Providers regularly tighten, loosen, or remove free tiers. When that happens you'll see 429s or auth errors until you update the catalog. Re-seed scripts live in server/src/scripts/ . No SLA, by definition. If you need reliability, use a paid provider with a contract. Local-first. There's no multi-tenant auth. Run this for yourself; don't expose it to the internet. Contributing Contributors very welcome! Good first PRs: Add a provider — copy server/src/providers/openai-compat.ts as a template, wire it into server/src/providers/index.ts , seed its models in server/src/db/index.ts , add a test in server/src/__tests__/providers/ . Add an endpoint — embeddings, images, moderations. The provider base class can grow new methods; adapters declare which they support. Improve the router — cost-aware routing (cheapest-healthy-fastest tradeoffs), better latency-weighted priority, regional pinning. Dashboard polish — charts on the Analytics page, key rotation UX, batch import of keys from .env . Docs — more examples, client library snippets for Go/Rust/etc., a deployment recipe for Docker or Fly. Development loop: npm install npm run dev # server on :3001, dashboard on :5173, both with HMR npm test # server vitest; also runs client tests if the workspace adds them npm run build # compile server and dashboard PRs should include a test, keep the existing test suite green, and match the .editorconfig / tsconfig defaults already in the repo. Issues and discussions are open. Contributors Terms of Service review A self-hosted, single-user, personal-use setup was re-reviewed against each provider's ToS (May 2026). Summary: Provider Verdict Notes Google Gemini ⚠️ Caution March 2026 ToS narrows scope to "professional or business purposes, not for consumer use" — a self-hosted developer proxy is still defensible, but the clause is new. Groq ✅ Likely OK GroqCloud Services Agreement permits Customer Application integration. Cerebras ✅ Likely OK Permitted; explicitly forbids selling/transferring API keys. Mistral ✅ Likely OK APIs allowed for personal/internal business use. OpenRouter ✅ Likely OK April 2026 ToS sharpens the no-resale / no-competing-service clause; private single-user proxy still fine. SambaNova ⚠️ Ambiguous EULA §1.5(c) blocks resale and "service bureau" use; single-user with no third-party access is fine. Cloudflare Workers AI ⚠️ Ambiguous No anti-proxy clause; covered by general Self-Serve Subscription Agreement. NVIDIA NIM ⚠️ Caution Trial ToS §1.2 / §1.4: "evaluation only, not production." Disabled in default catalog. GitHub Models ⚠️ Caution Free tier explicitly scoped to "experimentation" and "prototyping." Cohere ❌ Avoid Terms §14 still forbids "personal, family or household purposes." Zhipu (open.bigmodel.cn) ✅ Likely OK Personal/non-commercial research carve-out still in the platform docs. Z.ai (api.z.ai) ⚠️ Caution New row — Singapore entity (distinct from Zhipu CN). §III.3(l) anti-traffic-redirect clause could plausibly be read against a proxy; no explicit personal-use carve-out. Ollama Cloud ✅ Likely OK New row — Free plan permits cloud-model access (1 concurrent, 5-hour session caps). No anti-proxy / anti-resale clauses found. (Integration tracked in #14.) Rules of thumb that keep most providers happy: one account per provider , no reselling , no sharing your endpoint with other humans , don't hammer a free tier as a paid production backend . This is informational, not legal advice — read each provider's ToS and make your own call. Removed since the April 2026 review: Hugging Face, Moonshot, and MiniMax direct integrations were dropped from the catalog (HF — tool-call format issues; Moonshot — moved to paid only; MiniMax — superseded by the OpenRouter minimax/minimax-m2.5:free route). Disclaimer This project is for personal experimentation and learning, not production. Free tiers exist so developers can prototype against them; they aren't a stable, supported inference substrate and shouldn't be treated as one. If you build something real on top of FreeLLMAPI, swap in a paid API before you ship. Your relationship with each upstream provider is governed by the terms you accepted when you created your account — those terms still apply when the traffic is proxied through this project, and you're responsible for complying with them. Star History License MIT