The chronic failure mode of building on free models is that the IDs die. All four of the tutorial-era OpenRouter ones did — llama-3.3-70b-instruct:free, deepseek-r1:free, gemini-2.0-flash-exp:free, mistral-7b-instruct:free are all gone from the catalog.
The catalog now contains a structural fix that's easy to miss: openrouter/free — the Free Models Router. It's a meta-model that selects among whatever free models currently exist. It cannot be retired out from under you, because it doesn't name a model.
The trade: you give up knowing which model answers (quality varies per request), and the advertised context is 200K — the floor of the pool, not the max. Fine for demos, background summarisation, anything where "a decent free model" is the actual requirement. Wrong for anything where output consistency matters.
For pinned IDs, the live list is one call: curl -s https://openrouter.ai/api/v1/models.
Current free lineup and the rate-limit gate: https://toolfreebie.com/openrouter-free-ai-models/
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