How I Built a Free AI Chatbot With 12+ Models, Voice, Coding, and Image Generation — All for $0

Free AI — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 21:27:41 +0000

I spent the last few months building Free AI — a completely free AI assistant that does what paid tools charge $20/month for. Here's what it can do and how I built it.

What It Does:

Chat — unlimited messages, no daily caps
Web search — answers with live source citations
Code execution — runs JavaScript, Python, TypeScript, HTML/CSS, and more in the browser
Image generation — free AI image creation
Voice conversation — real-time voice chat with the AI
File analysis — upload PDFs, images, documents and ask questions about them
Multi-agent bots — a team of AI agents that collaborate on complex tasks
Cross-chat memory — the AI remembers facts across conversations
Think mode — toggle deeper reasoning for complex problems

The Tech Stack:

Frontend: React 19, TypeScript, Vite, Tailwind CSS, Framer Motion
Backend: Convex (real-time database + serverless functions)
AI Models: 12+ free models via NVIDIA NIM, Groq, Google Gemini, and OpenRouter
Auth: Convex Auth with email OTP
Code Execution: Pyodide (Python in the browser), sandboxed JavaScript
Voice: Edge TTS + Web Speech API
Search: Exa API for web search with source citations

How the Model Routing Works

The system automatically routes requests to the best available model:

Tries NVIDIA models first (DeepSeek, Nemotron)
Falls back to Groq (Llama 3.3 70B) if overloaded
Falls back to Gemini Flash
Falls back to OpenRouter free models
Each provider has a 12-second timeout — fails fast, moves on

Users never see the routing. They just get an answer.

The Bot System (My Favorite Part)

When users enable "Bots," a planner agent analyzes the request, creates a task graph, and assigns roles to multiple AI agents that work in parallel:

Project Manager
Frontend Developer
Backend Engineer
QA Tester
Security Reviewer

They share a workspace, review each other's work, and produce one final result. The user sees a live activity feed and a neural brain visualization that grows as the bots work.

What I Learned:

Free models are surprisingly good — DeepSeek and Llama 3.3 rival GPT-4 for most tasks
Fallback chains are essential — any single provider will go down. Having 4+ providers means 99.9% uptime
Simplicity wins — the chat interface is intentionally minimal. No plugins, no menus, no complexity
Real-time is addictive — Convex reactive queries make the UI feel alive. Messages stream in, the bot activity panel updates live, the brain visualization pulses

Try It:

👉 getfree-ai.com — no signup required, completely free

I'd love feedback from the dev community. What features would you add? What's missing?

DEV Community: Free AI

How I Built a Free AI Chatbot With 12+ Models, Voice, Coding, and Image Generation — All for $0