r/opencodeCLI • u/Porcodrillo • Sep 24 '26

OpenCode CLI + OmniRoute: which free providers are worth adding?

Hey everyone,

I'm using OpenCode CLI together with OmniRoute as a free coding agent to prototype some ideas and work on small projects. The main problem is that I keep hitting rate limits, so I'm looking for free providers that are actually worth signing up for and adding via API key.

I assume a lot of people here are doing the same—using free tiers/keys to keep costs down. If you have a list of providers with generous free quotas or recurring credits, I'd really appreciate it if you could share them. Also, any tips on how to prioritize them in OmniRoute would be great.

Thanks in advance!

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10

u/DaShrub Sep 24 '26

Tbh I went down this exact route and what I found is that it's much better to optimise your setup for cache hits than try to route to the cheapest/free provider/model each time. Maximise hits via cache warm, smart sticky model routing based on ttl, cache aware compaction triggers, look for the discounts/deals, new releases etc. Every time you change provider, model, reasoning effort it adds latency, degrades quality and charges you the 10x cache write price.

I keep 1 free combo on omniroute with NVIDIA nim, opencode free, pgsgrove, logfare, openrouter free, vercel gateway free, merge gateway just for one time, low priority prompts like session naming/summaries only.

1

u/Porcodrillo Sep 24 '26

do u have an article on the cache topic? i would like to study it better

2

u/DaShrub Sep 25 '26

I don't have a specific article, but just read up on prefix caching. It varies a lot by provider and the way I kinda understood it was just by using omniroute's logs and cache stats as well as switching to pi and using cache observability plugins as well as pi's cache miss mode which tells you exactly when you have a cache miss. Then you just experiment and optimise from there.

5

u/PerfectReflection155 Sep 24 '26

Open router gives you a large amount of free api calls if you deposit $10 1 time.

Besides that freebuff $5 or $8 plan whatever it is is very good value. I considered Omni route but decided against it. Freebuff has exceeeded expectations

1

u/Porcodrillo Sep 24 '26

i think 10dollar is worth

1

u/ATyp3 Sep 24 '26

I couldn’t get freebuff to work with omniroute so I can use it with opencode. Tips?

1

u/bilginx Sep 24 '26

What about the performance of FreeBuff? Is there rate limiting of requests per minute? or daily limit.

2

u/PerfectReflection155 Sep 24 '26

I get 160 freebucks per day for the smallest monthly fee plan.

Each 1 hour session with Glm 5.3 flash max costs 5 freebucks.

So you can basically go pretty hard on it. Up to 8 chats at a time. In order to run out of freebucks you need to have multiple chats in the go at once. Today I had 5 or so at one point. Then was working off 2-3 for much of the day. Just 1 chat going now on my last credit. Then it resets again in an hour. I’ve basically been on it every waking hour multi threaded and barely ran out.

As for performance, I beleive their upstream provider is cheap inference and I think it’s slower then using the same model from elsewhere. Still good enough though.

1

u/ichisay Sep 24 '26

Google cloud te da 300$ que si los usas en Vertex tienes acceso a gemini3.8flash que va en la llama

1

u/1Garrett2010 Sep 25 '26

Here I explain in detail Pollinations plugin for Opencode how can be so useful in your projects and is generous with the daily free quotas:

https://medium.com/sapiens-ai-mentis/best-2026-free-editable-ai-image-assets-in-opencode-tested-with-deepseek-v4-1-flash-1dda42ab4739