I tested 15 AI models without spending a cent. Here's what surprised me.

#ai #llm #api #webdev

AIBridge has a free playground. No signup. No email. No password.
10 requests per day. All models available.

I picked Kimi K3 first — the one with 1M context and always-on reasoning.

Prompt 1: "Find every silently-swallowed exception in this Python file"

Pasted 800 lines. K3 read every one. Returned 7 locations with line numbers,
the bug type, and a suggested fix. 263 tokens. 2.1 seconds.

Prompt 2: "Translate this API doc to Chinese, keep code examples intact"

Switched to qwen-max. 600 words of documentation. Clean translation.
Code blocks untouched. 89 tokens. 0.9 seconds.

Prompt 3: "Classify these 20 customer reviews as positive/neutral/negative"

Switched to deepseek-chat. $0.27/M token price. All 20 classified correctly
in one request. 156 tokens. 0.7 seconds.

What I learned in 10 prompts

The expensive model ($7/M) is overkill for 90% of tasks
The cheap model ($0.27/M) handles classification, summarization, and simple generation indistinguishably from the expensive one
You can swap models by changing one string. Same endpoint. Same code
The playground resets daily. I came back three days in a row

The migration path

After the playground, getting a real API key took one click — GitHub OAuth.
No email. No password. Five seconds.

import openai
client = openai.OpenAI(
api_key="mb-xxx",
base_url="https://aibridge-api.com/v1"
)
client.chat.completions.create(
model="deepseek-chat",
messages=[{"role":"user","content":"Classify this review"}]
)

If I need more power, I change one string: model="kimi-k3". If I need
multilingual: model="qwen-max". The code doesn't change.

Free tier is 500K tokens/month. Enough to run classification, summarization,
and simple generation for a small production app.

→ Try the playground with no signup:
aibridge-api.com/playground.html
→ Grab a key with GitHub OAuth:
aibridge-api.com/register.html