How the FreeTheAI marketplace works

1. Create an account with an email address and confirm it.
2. Add funds on Credits: pick an amount from $5 to $500, then pay it in crypto at the checkout. No crypto? Pay with a card through a voucher instead.
3. Find a model on Models and Follow the providers you want. API keys only send requests to providers you follow.
4. Make an API key on API keys. Choose how it picks a provider: cheapest (the default) or fastest.
5. Call https://api.freetheai.org/v1 with any OpenAI SDK, or any app that takes an OpenAI-compatible base URL. The setup guides cover 24 apps, from SillyTavern to Claude Code.

curl https://api.freetheai.org/v1/chat/completions \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $FREETHEAI_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"model": "glm-5.3", "messages": [{"role": "user", "content": "Hello"}]}'

A model can have several providers. Each provider is an independent seller with its own price, speed, and reliability, and each model page on Models lists them side by side with their 7-day success rate, speed, time to first token, cache hits, and last error. FreeTheAI gives every seller a generated public name, so the marketplace stays neutral.

Prices are in US dollars per million input and output tokens (cache reads often cost less). Media models are priced per unit instead: per image, per second of video, per minute of audio, or per million characters of speech.

• Only providers you follow. A key never sends a request to a provider you have not followed, and never to your own listings if you also sell.
• Cheapest or fastest. Each key ranks providers by price for a typical request, or by recent time to first token.
• A price guard. By default a key will not use a provider more than 25% above the cheapest one for that model; when only dearer ones are free, you get a clear busy error instead of a surprise bill. You can set it to 0%, 50%, or any price.
• Healthy providers first. A provider failing many requests on a model is skipped while a healthy one is available.
• Automatic retry. If a provider fails before it sends anything (busy, rate limited, down), the request runs again on another provider you follow, up to two more times. You are charged once, for the reply you get.
• Pick one yourself. Put a provider's name in front of the model ID, as <provider>/glm-5.3, to send a request only to that provider. Each model page shows the exact ID for each provider.

Every text model answers in each of these formats, even when the model's own provider only speaks one of them. FreeTheAI converts requests and replies, streaming included.

Where sellers offer them, the same key also serves embeddings (/v1/embeddings), image generation (/v1/images/generations), speech (/v1/audio/speech), transcription (/v1/audio/transcriptions), and video (/v1/videos). From text to images, embeddings, and speech, it is one balance and one key.

• Before a request is sent, its most it could cost is held from your balance. When the reply ends you pay for what it used and the rest of the hold is released at once.
• A request that fails costs nothing; its hold is released.
• Your balance may go up to $1 below zero on the request that empties it. New paid requests wait until you add funds.
• Up to 3 paid requests run at once per account.
• The Logs page shows every request with its provider, tokens, and charge, and why that provider was picked.

Your balance is kept in US dollars. To add funds, open Credits, choose an amount from $5 to $500, accept the purchase terms, and continue to the crypto checkout. Pick a coin there (Bitcoin, Litecoin, USDT, and the other coins it lists), send the exact amount it shows to its address, and your balance updates once the payment confirms on the network. The checkout stays open for an hour.

FreeTheAI asks for no ID. An email address is all an account needs.

Only have a bank card? The pay by card guide shows how to buy a crypto voucher with a card and send it straight to the checkout, with no wallet and no crypto experience. Crypto payments cannot be reversed, and purchases are final (Terms).

• Sellers do not get your account, email, or API key. Your request reaches the seller without who you are.
• The seller that serves a request processes its content to answer it. Sellers are independent third parties, so FreeTheAI cannot promise zero data retention for what a seller does with request content. Do not send anything you could not share with a third party.
• The Privacy Policy says what FreeTheAI keeps and for how long.

Anyone with an OpenAI-, Anthropic-, or Gemini-compatible endpoint can apply to sell. You set your prices, FreeTheAI brings the buyers, and you are paid in crypto after a short hold. An AI agent can do the whole setup for you. See Sell on FreeTheAI.

• Site summary: llms.txt, full text: llms-full.txt.
• This page as Markdown: /docs/how-it-works.md. Selling: /sell.md. Every API error and its fix: /docs/errors.md.
• API docs: docs.freetheai.org. API catalog: /.well-known/api-catalog.
• Sellers' agents connect to the Seller MCP server at https://mcp.freetheai.org/seller with a token from AI agent access.
• An agent can do everything with an API key. Sign-up, adding funds, and making keys are done by the person in the dashboard; never ask them for their password.