Cline's zero-cost setup broke when OpenRouter's :free Llama vanished

The standard "Cline for $0" recipe was: point it at OpenRouter, select meta-llama/llama-3.3-70b-instruct:free, done. That model ID is no longer in OpenRouter's catalog — along with deepseek/deepseek-r1:free, google/gemini-2.0-flash-exp:free and mistralai/mistral-7b-instruct:free. All four of the tutorial-era free IDs are gone.

Cline surfaces this badly: depending on version you get a raw provider error or a silent failure to respond, neither of which says "this model was retired."

The catalog is public, so the fix takes one command — pick a current :free model instead:

curl -s https://openrouter.ai/api/v1/models | grep ':free'

z-ai/glm-5.2:free and the Nemotron 3 family are the strongest coding options on the list today.

Full setup and which models handle Cline's long system prompt: https://toolfreebie.com/cline-vscode-ai-agent/