Free LLM APIs for OpenClaw: Every Provider Compared (2026)

Your OpenClaw instance is running. Messenger connections are set up. But now comes the part that trips up most new users: which API do you use without spending money you don't have?

Good news. As of February 2026, you can pick from ten-plus free options. I've spent the past few months testing practically every one of these with OpenClaw. Some are great, some aren't worth the signup time. Here's what I found: an honest breakdown with real limits and actual setup steps.

Quick Comparison: All Free Providers at a Glance

Quick scan instead of data overload. The most important column is "OpenClaw Native." Native providers need nothing more than an API key in your .env file. Everything else means 20 to 30 minutes of extra configuration. If you're just starting out, that distinction saves a lot of frustration.

Something most comparison articles skip: DeepSeek and Together AI don't have permanent free tiers. Those are signup credits that expire after 30 to 90 days. Still useful for testing, but not comparable to Groq or Mistral for ongoing use. If you're building something that needs to run free for months, stick with Groq and Mistral.

OpenRouter: One API Key, 24+ Free Models

Where I tell everyone to start. One API key gives you access to over 24 free models. Gemini 2.0 Flash, Llama 3.3 70B, DeepSeek R1. You switch models by changing one line in your config. No new account, no new key.

OpenClaw has native support for OpenRouter, so there's zero custom configuration needed. Create an account, grab your key, drop it in. Five minutes.

Here's what that looked like in practice: I used OpenRouter while testing a bot that needed to compare different providers. Within a week I'd tried 15 different models without touching my code. That would have taken significantly longer with separate accounts and separate API keys for each provider.

The limits:

• 20 requests per minute

• 50 requests per day (used to be 200 before April 2025)

• $10 one-time payment bumps this to 1,000 per day

50 requests a day sounds tight. It is, for an active bot. OpenRouter cut the daily limit from 200 to 50 in April 2025. The developer community now considers the $10 one-time purchase the actual free tier. I still think for getting started and testing different models, it's the best entry point.

OpenClaw Setup:

{
  "env": {
    "OPENROUTER_API_KEY": "sk-or-..."
  },
  "agents": {
    "defaults": {
      "model": {
        "primary": "openrouter/google/gemini-2.0-flash-exp:free"
      }
    }
  }
}

Groq: The Fastest Option Available

If your OpenClaw bot runs on Telegram or WhatsApp and you need responses in under a second, Groq is what you want. Response times are genuinely remarkable: over 300 tokens per second on Llama 3.3 70B. For users, it feels like the bot finished answering before they finished typing.

The reason: Groq uses custom LPU chips (Language Processing Units) instead of standard GPUs. The result is sub-second response times, even on larger models.

Free tier limits:

For the current numbers, Groq's official rate limits page is the most reliable source. These change occasionally.

What does 1,000 requests per day actually mean? Say your bot gets used by 10 people daily, each sending about 5 messages. That's 100 requests per day. You have room for 9 more active users before Groq throttles you. For a personal assistant or internal team bot? Plenty. For a public bot with 500 users? You'll hit the ceiling.

OpenClaw Setup:

{
  "env": {
    "GROQ_API_KEY": "gsk_..."
  },
  "agents": {
    "defaults": {
      "model": {
        "primary": "groq/llama-3.3-70b-versatile"
      }
    }
  }
}

Google Gemini: The Biggest Token Budget

Google quietly reduced Gemini free tier limits by 50 to 80% in December 2025, without any public announcement. Annoying, honestly. Gemini 2.5 Pro now sits at 5 requests per minute and 25 per day. That's not much.

But Gemini 2.0 Flash still offers 15 RPM, 1,500 requests per day, and 250,000 tokens per minute. With a 1-million-token context window. If you need to process long documents, Gemini Flash is still the best free option. Nothing else offers that context window for free.

The catch: Your data is likely used for model training on the free tier. Not ideal for anything sensitive.

OpenClaw Setup:

{
  "env": {
    "GOOGLE_API_KEY": "AIza..."
  },
  "agents": {
    "defaults": {
      "model": {
        "primary": "google/gemini-2.0-flash"
      }
    }
  }
}

Mistral AI: 1 Billion Tokens Per Month. Free.

Mistral flies under the radar in most comparisons. It shouldn't. The French company offers a free tier on "La Plateforme" that allows up to 1 billion tokens per month. One billion. Per month. No cost.

The tradeoff? 1 request per second. Sounds low. For a bot that 1 or 2 people use? Completely fine. For 50 simultaneous users? That's where it gets slow.

Honestly, this limit put me off at first. After three weeks of testing, I had to admit it didn't matter for my use case at all. The limitation is real, but it's irrelevant for most personal or small-team bots.

You also need to verify your phone number at signup and agree to their data usage terms. Some developers care about that, others don't.

Available free models:

• Mistral Small (for quick tasks)

• Mistral Large (for more demanding queries)

• Codestral (code-focused, 30 RPM, 2,000 req/day)

For pure monthly token volume, Mistral is the clear winner. Nothing else comes close.

OpenClaw Setup:

{
  "env": {
    "MISTRAL_API_KEY": "..."
  },
  "agents": {
    "defaults": {
      "model": {
        "primary": "mistral/mistral-small-latest"
      }
    }
  }
}

Cerebras: The Underrated Pick

Cerebras is the provider I recommend most often when someone wants Groq-like speed but needs more volume. 1 million free tokens per day, 30 requests per minute. And the speed is genuinely impressive. I've seen response times under 500ms even with the 120B parameter model. For a free service, that's excellent.

Available models:

Cerebras has native OpenClaw support. Setup works like the other built-in providers.

DeepSeek: $5 Signup Credit for 30 Days

DeepSeek isn't really a free provider. New accounts get $5 in credit that expires after 30 days. After that, pay-per-use (cheap at $0.14 per million input tokens on V3, but not free).

Why it's still on the list: DeepSeek R1 and V3 compete at GPT-4 quality. For 30 days of testing, you're getting a model that holds its own against expensive alternatives. And through OpenRouter, DeepSeek R1 is permanently available for free (within the 50 req/day limit).

OpenClaw Setup (Custom Provider):

{
  "models": {
    "providers": {
      "deepseek": {
        "api": "openai-completions",
        "baseUrl": "https://api.deepseek.com/v1",
        "key": "${DEEPSEEK_API_KEY}"
      }
    }
  }
}

Together AI: $25 Signup Credit

Similar to DeepSeek: no permanent free tier, but $25 in signup credit. The range of available open-source models is huge (Llama, Mixtral, Qwen, and more). Credits expire in 30 to 90 days depending on account type.

Good for experimenting. Not suitable for long-term operation unless you switch to paid afterward.

OpenClaw Setup: Custom provider with api: "openai-completions" and baseUrl: "https://api.together.xyz/v1".

Cohere: 1,000 Calls Per Month (Dev Only)

Cohere offers a trial API key with 1,000 calls per month and 20 requests per minute. The caveat: trial keys are explicitly not for commercial or production use.

Where Cohere shines is RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) and embeddings. If your OpenClaw bot needs to search through documents, Cohere could work as the embedding provider while you use a different provider for chat.

Hugging Face: Experimentation Only

Hugging Face offers a serverless Inference API that's free to use. Rate limits are intentionally low and inconsistently documented. A few hundred requests per hour, depending on the model and server load.

Hugging Face explicitly says the service is "not meant for heavy production applications." Model availability varies. Not recommended for production OpenClaw bots. But for quickly testing an open-source model before installing it locally? It works for that.

Cloudflare Workers AI: Own API Format, 10K Neurons/Day

Cloudflare offers 50+ models with a free tier of 10,000 neurons per day. Not directly translatable to tokens, but roughly 200 to 500 simple requests.

The problem for OpenClaw users: Cloudflare uses its own REST API format, not OpenAI-compatible. That means significantly more configuration work. For most OpenClaw setups, probably not the best starting point.

Which Provider for Which Use Case?

Okay, enough data. Here's what I actually recommend based on real OpenClaw usage.

Just getting started? OpenRouter. One API key, 24+ models. Five-minute setup. The 50 requests per day let you try different models without spending anything.

Your bot needs fast responses? Groq for Telegram/WhatsApp (under 1 second), Cerebras if you need more than 1,000 requests per day (fast and volume).

You need high volume but speed isn't critical? Mistral. 1 billion tokens per month is hard to beat.

You want to test the best quality? DeepSeek through OpenRouter (free) or directly with the $5 signup credit. DeepSeek R1 is impressively close to GPT-4 for reasoning tasks.

You work with long documents? Gemini Flash. The 1-million-token context window isn't available anywhere else for free.

One warning though: clean recommendations sound great on paper. In practice, no provider is 100% perfect. Some APIs are occasionally slower, some go down. That's not a surprise, that's the reality of free tiers.

Best strategy: start with OpenRouter (test different models), then switch to Groq or Mistral as your primary provider, keep OpenRouter as fallback. OpenClaw supports this with fallback configurations.

Ready to start?
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OpenClaw LLM Setup: Native vs. Custom Provider

This is the distinction that can either double or halve your setup time. According to the OpenClaw configuration documentation, there are two paths:

Natively supported (5-minute setup): OpenRouter, Groq, Gemini, Mistral, Cerebras. You only need the API key in your .env file and the correct model string in your config.

Custom provider (20-30 minute setup): DeepSeek, Together AI, Cohere, Hugging Face, Cloudflare. You need to create a models.providers block in your OpenClaw JSON configuration with the base URL and API format.

If you're hosting on ClawHosters, this is handled through the ClawHosters dashboard. Drop in your API key, select your model, save. No SSH, no config files.

Wrap-Up

The best free LLM API for your OpenClaw bot depends on what you're actually building. For beginners: OpenRouter (simple, many models). For speed: Groq or Cerebras. For volume: Mistral with 1 billion tokens per month.

I'd recommend starting with OpenRouter and switching once you know what you actually need. Most people end up with Groq or Mistral as their primary provider, OpenRouter as fallback.