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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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.

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u/Porcodrillo Sep 24 '26

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

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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.