Dobby is freeeeeee — no key, no signup, no card. We don't read docs, we call the endpoint and publish what came back, including the 402s.
Free LLM API resources lists, and a live alternative
Search for free LLM API resources and you land on GitHub lists and directory sites. They are useful for finding providers, and every one of them is a snapshot. The list people name most, cheahjs/free-llm-api-resources, answered 404 on 12 October 2026 when we fetched it, and a search for its name returns forks whose last commits run from August 2024 to this week.
That is not a complaint about the people who kept those lists. It is what a list is: a person's reading of provider pages on the day they read them. This page says what the reading cannot tell you, and what an hourly call adds.
What a list tells you, and what a probe tells you
| Question | A list of resources | An hourly probe |
|---|---|---|
| Which providers offer a free tier? | Yes: this is what lists are for, and they cover far more providers than we do. | Only the 10 we track. |
| What quota does the provider publish? | Yes, as of the day it was copied. | No. We do not restate a limit; we count the refusals we received. |
| Did a real call answer in the last hour? | No. | Yes, with the time it answered. |
| What was the refusal: rate limit, spent budget or missing key? | No. | Yes: each probe records the outcome and the HTTP status. |
| Does tool calling or JSON schema actually work? | As claimed by the provider. | Proved by a call that parsed, or marked as claimed and not proved. |
| Can a program ask? | Scrape a README. | GET /api/llm/up, JSON, no key. See the reference. |
What the probing has found so far
- 8500 probes were recorded across 10 endpoints in the last 14 days.
- Right now 37 models answer with no key and 81 models more answer our own free-tier key.
- We cross-checked the no-key claims in a 226-provider routing registry by calling them. 17 claims did not hold and are listed, with the call that ended each, on the no-key page.
- The most common false positive is a catalogue that lists its models without a key and answers the chat call
401. A list built from reading provider pages cannot see that; a call can.
When a list is still the right tool
To discover providers we do not track, use a list: ours is short on purpose, because every provider on it is called hourly and a long list we could not keep checking would be the thing we are criticising. Our own limits are written on every row. The key-required rows were measured with our free-tier key, which says the endpoint answered our account and nothing about what a new signup receives.
Using both
- Find candidates in a list.
- Ask what is answering now:
curl -s https://stillworks.supercapybara.com/api/llm/up. Add?key=anyto include providers that need your own key. - Open the provider's page for its probe log and its last refusal before you build on it: Groq, OpenRouter, Mistral, or the no-key providers.