Free · Coding · 6 of 10 tools · updated Oct 17, 2026
Free AI tools for LLM APIs & model routers
Hugging Face is the strongest tool for LLM APIs & model routers you can use without paying, at 94/100. What you get for nothing: Free hub; Pro $9/mo; usage-based inference. 6 of the 10 tools tracked for this job have a free tier, an open-source licence, or are free outright. It is also the top-ranked tool for this job overall, free or not.
Same evidence score as the ranking — GitHub stars, Hacker News mentions, release activity, free access — recomputed nightly, never sold. See all 10 tools for LLM APIs & model routers.
Top 3
evidence / 100
+ Every open model ends up here, with Inference Providers routing to multiple backends.
− Serverless inference rate limits and cold starts make it unreliable for production.
+ Self-hosted gateway with spend tracking, virtual keys, and fallbacks across providers.
− Huge dependency surface and frequent releases that occasionally break provider mappings.
+ Serves many concurrent requests on GPUs far faster than llama.cpp-based tools.
− Linux and NVIDIA-centric; painful on Mac or consumer hardware.
All 6, side by side
| Tool | Score | Pricing | What you get free | Platforms |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hugging Face | 94 | Free tier | Free hub; Pro $9/mo; usage-based inference | web, api, cli |
| LiteLLM | 92 | Open source | Free; enterprise proxy paid | cli, api, linux |
| vLLM | 80 | Open source | Free | linux, cli, api |
 Vercel AI SDK | 72 | Open source | Free; AI Gateway usage-based | api, cli |
 OpenRouter | 42 | Free tier | Pay per token; small fee on credit purchases; some free models | api, web |
 Groq | 9 | Free tier | Free tier; pay per token | api, web |
A free tier counts, and so does an open-source licence you can self-host — both are in the table, so a tool that is only free for a trial is not here.
Head to head: Hugging Face vs LiteLLM Hugging Face vs vLLM LiteLLM vs vLLM