Free GPT-4o API access died with GitHub Models

GitHub Models was retired on 2026-07-30 — playground, catalog, inference API, BYOK, all of it. That part made the changelogs.

The part that didn't: it was the only place a free tier handed out a frontier closed model. GPT-4o, authenticated with the GITHUB_TOKEN you already had in CI, zero signup. That specific thing now exists nowhere.

Every remaining $0 tier serves open-weight models only — gpt-oss, Qwen, GLM, Llama, Nemotron — on Groq, OpenRouter, Cloudflare and the like. Microsoft's official migration path is Foundry Models, which is the same catalog behind an Azure subscription, i.e. paid.

So "where do I get free GPT-4o now" has a one-word answer: nowhere. The realistic question is which open-weight model at which provider replaces it for your workload.

I keep the migration table and current free limits here: https://toolfreebie.com/github-models-free-api/