Free AI models just got really good. Here's how to use 23 of them with one API key.

#ai #webdev #opensource #beginners

This week three free models dropped that compete with paid ones:

Qwen 3.6 Plus scores 61.6 on Terminal-Bench. Claude 4.5 Opus scores 59.3. Qwen is free. 1M context window.
Gemma 4 31B is Google's first Apache 2.0 model. It understands images and text.
GPT-OSS 120B is OpenAI's first open source model.

A year ago you'd pay $20-100/month for this quality. Now it's free.

The catch: each model needs its own account. Want to try all three? That's three signups, three API keys, three different ways to call them.

One key for everything

I found Kyma API. You sign up once, get one key, and use it for 23 models.

Here's what the code looks like:

from openai import OpenAI

client = OpenAI(
    base_url="https://kymaapi.com/v1",
    api_key="ky-your-key"
)

# Use Qwen 3.6 Plus
response = client.chat.completions.create(
    model="qwen-3.6-plus",
    messages=[{"role": "user", "content": "Review this code"}]
)

# Want Gemma 4 instead? Change one word.
response = client.chat.completions.create(
    model="gemma-4-31b",
    messages=[{"role": "user", "content": "What's in this image?"}]
)

If your code works with OpenAI, it works with this. Same format. No new library.

Which model for what

What you want to do	Use this	Why
Write code	Qwen 3 32B or Kimi K2	Top coding benchmarks
Analyze a long document	Gemini 2.5 Flash	1M token context
General questions	Llama 3.3 70B	Best all-rounder
Get the smartest answer	Qwen 3 235B	Largest free model available
Get the fastest answer	Llama 3.1 8B	About 100ms
Understand images	Gemma 4 31B	Multimodal
Try the latest trending	Qwen 3.6 Plus	Just released this week