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I built an OpenAI-compatible gateway that routes across 5 free LLM providers

Devansh on April 06, 2026

Every LLM provider has a free tier. Groq gives you 30 requests per minute. Gemini gives you 15. Cerebras gives you 30. Mistral gives you 5. Combi...
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KamalMostafa

Thanks for sharing, How to create an API key for your proxy? Idea or improvement, Add feature to use multiple API key per provider this will increase dramatically the limits per user at leat avail it for development.

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Devansh

thanks kamal for your suggestion. i have now added multiple API key per provider feature aswell.

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KamalMostafa

Thanks. how to create the API Key?

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Devansh

the api key is optional. Also you need to self host this for using this.

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KamalMostafa

Yes I know I need to self-host it also its optional. but, couldn't find any reference in your docs that is why I'm asking.

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Devansh

There's no generator for it. You just invent a random string yourself and set it as FREELLM_API_KEY in your env.

Quickest ways to make one:

openssl rand -hex 32
or
uuidgen
or in Node:
node -e "console.log(require('crypto').randomBytes(32).toString('hex'))"

Take the output, drop it into your .env as FREELLM_API_KEY=... (or into Railway/Render's env settings), and send it as Authorization: Bearer on your requests.

No signup, no account needed. It's just a password you pick so strangers on the internet can't hit your gateway and burn through your Groq/Gemini quota.

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Nicolas Fränkel

It's good as a learning exercise. Otherwise, you are reinventing the wheel:

github.com/maximhq/bifrost

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Devansh

what?

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Nicolas Fränkel

Existing products do the same.

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Devansh

It's have some additional usefull features. Please explore the project docs.

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Nicolas Fränkel

You can add useful features, it won't beat an existing team project with a high velocity. Hence, it's great as a learning project, but unless you rally others around you, it will stay a learning project.

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Devansh

yes i agreed