Penny-Pincher Provider

A curated list of affordable (or almost free) LLM providers for people who are unwilling to pay premium prices for AI.

Note: Claude is arguably the best AI coding assistant out there — but it’s expensive. If you want to try it before committing, you can use my guest pass for 1 week of free Claude Pro (includes Claude Code): https://claude.ai/referral/ZkoAngod1A

Guest passes are limited and available on a first-come, first-served basis. New users only — you’ll need to enter payment info to activate, but you can cancel before the trial ends to avoid charges. Learn more.

If you know of other providers, feel free to create a pull request or open an issue here. I will review and add them when possible. Thank you!

If you find this helpful, you can support me by donating or registering with my referral links. Thank you!

Providers with Coding Plans

These providers offer coding plan subscriptions. You can prepay a monthly fee and use their LLM APIs with usage limits.

Z.ai

Offers 3 plans:

1. Lite: 3x usage of the Claude Pro plan
2. Pro: 5x Lite plan usage
3. Max: 4x Pro plan usage

Prices vary based on plan duration (monthly, quarterly, or yearly) and occasional promotional offers, so check the website for current pricing.

Source: https://z.ai/subscribe ¹

Homepage: https://docs.z.ai/devpack/overview

My referral:

🚀 You’ve been invited to join the GLM Coding Plan! Enjoy full support for Claude Code, Cline, and 20+ top coding tools — starting at just $10/month. Subscribe now and grab the limited-time deal! Link： https://z.ai/subscribe?ic=PLKIAYEIPW

MiniMax

Offers a Token Plan — a unified subscription for multimodal AI (text, speech, video, image, music). Pricing is based on API calls, not tokens — very generous!

Plans (monthly):

• Starter: $10/month — 1,500 M2.7 requests per 5-hour rolling window
• Plus: $20/month — more requests + speech, image, music generation
• Max: $50/month — even higher quotas across all models
• Highspeed tiers ($40–$150/month) — dedicated M2.7-highspeed access, up to 30,000 requests per 5-hour window

Includes access to M2.7 language model, Speech 2.8, Image-01, Hailuo video, and Music-2.5. Yearly plans available with ~17% discount.

Source: https://platform.minimax.io/docs/token-plan/intro, https://platform.minimax.io/docs/guides/pricing-token-plan ²

Homepage: https://platform.minimax.io

Free Providers

OpenRouter

Free usage limits: If you’re using a free model variant (with an ID ending in :free), you can make up to 20 requests per minute. The following per-day limits apply:

• If you have purchased less than 10 credits, you’re limited to 50 :free model requests per day.
• If you purchase at least 10 credits, your daily limit is increased to 1000 :free model requests per day.

Source: https://openrouter.ai/docs/api/reference/limits ³

Homepage: https://openrouter.ai