Hello everyone! 👋 Today, I’m sharing my feedback and a few tips on how to work efficiently with AI without breaking the bank. For budget reasons, I quickly turned to open source. I first tested local models: they are great for learning, but let's be honest, their performance is often too limited for real professional use (beyond a simple chatbot or sorting emails). After a lot of research and experimentation, here is the setup I use today to power my AI agents at a lower cost, without sacrificing power: 🌐 API Aggregation: Freellmapi (the alternative to Omniroute) We hear a lot about Omniroute (https://omniroute.online/), but I personally find it heavy, buggy, and unnecessarily complicated. My choice went to Freellmapi (https://freellmapi.co/), which lets you aggregate a large number of LLM API keys with very generous free quotas. Feel free to test both and make up your own mind! 💻 For coding: The hidden gem, Freebuff I stumbled upon this tool a few months ago, and it is simply incredible. It's 100% free and gives you access to excellent models (DeepSeek V4 Pro, MiMo 2.5 Pro, Kimi K2.7 Code, DeepSeek V4 Flash, MiMo 2.5, MiniMax M3...). - The only limit: A 5-hour/day quota for the most powerful models (the others are unlimited!). - The ecosystem: Available in Web, Desktop, Cloud, and even CLI versions. - The trade-off: A few very discreet ad banners in the interface. I now use it for all my heavy coding tasks that used to drain my weekly quotas. I'm actually surprised it's not talked about more, given the number of YouTube videos over-hyping much less effective "tricks" for free big models... 🎁 If you want to try Freebuff, here is my referral link (it would help me unlock the GLM 5.2 model!): https://freebuff.com/get-started?ref=ref-7c34306d-0a0a-4da2-9e66-01d565d4e115&referrer=yannickvougeot