OpenRouter’s :free daily cap (50/day, or 1000/day once you have ever bought $10 of credits) is shared across ALL :free models on the account, not per model. Per-row rpd values here are therefore optimistic; the router’s cooldown handling absorbs the shared 429s.
NVIDIA NIM replaced its depleting trial credits with a recurring per-account rate limit (40 RPM default, varies by model), verified June 2026. The trial ToS still scopes usage to evaluation/prototyping, not production.
Get this model the moment it changes
Limits move, models get replaced, better ones launch. Premium routers see this page's data live. Free routers see last month's.
FreeLLMAPI is a self-hosted router you run yourself. Install it, paste in your free OpenRouter key, and nvidia/nemotron-3.5-content-safety:free answers on an OpenAI-compatible endpoint at http://localhost:3001/v1. No credit card, no hosted middleman: your prompts and your provider keys never leave your machine.
Call nvidia/nemotron-3.5-content-safety:free with curl
curl http://localhost:3001/v1/chat/completions \
-H "Authorization: Bearer freellmapi-your-unified-key" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{
"model": "nvidia/nemotron-3.5-content-safety:free",
"messages": [{"role": "user", "content": "Say hi in five words."}]
}'
The same request in Python (openai)
from openai import OpenAI
client = OpenAI(
base_url="http://localhost:3001/v1",
api_key="freellmapi-your-unified-key",
)
resp = client.chat.completions.create(
model="nvidia/nemotron-3.5-content-safety:free",
messages=[{"role": "user", "content": "Say hi in five words."}],
)
print(resp.choices[0].message.content)
The router answers on /v1/chat/completions and every other OpenAI surface, plus the Anthropic Messages API, so existing clients need only a new base_url. Swap the model id for auto and the router picks the best free model that is still under its limits. Full reference: docs/api.md.
Related free models
Same key, same router, no extra setup. Any of these is one model id away.