Mar 13
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Use Claude Code completely free forever by routing it through OpenRouter's free tier — no credit card, no monthly fee, full AI coding power. In this 2-minute tutorial, I show you the exact 3-step setup to run Claude Code with top-tier free coding models like Qwen 2.5 Coder and DeepSeek R1. In this video, you'll learn: • Why Claude Code's default API costs $20–200/month (and how to avoid it) • What OpenRouter is and how its free tier works with Claude Code • Step-by-step setup: install, get free API key, configure in 2 minutes • The best free coding models for Claude Code (128k context, $0 cost) • A shell alias trick to switch models instantly ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ ⏱️ CHAPTERS ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 1:12 The cost problem with Claude Code 1:45 What is OpenRouter? 2:15 Best free models for coding 3:04 Step 1 — Install Claude Code 3:25 Step 2 — Get your free API key 4:05 Step 3 — Configure & run 6:00 Live demo + alias trick 8:35 Key takeaways ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 🔗 RESOURCES ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 📁 Full setup guide. ~/.claude/settings.json { "env": { "ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL": "https://openrouter.ai/api", "ANTHROPIC_AUTH_TOKEN": "sk-or-v1-YOUR-KEY-HERE", "ANTHROPIC_API_KEY": "", "ANTHROPIC_MODEL": "openrouter/free" } } 🔀 OpenRouter free models: https://openrouter.ai/models?q=free 📖 Claude Code docs: https://docs.anthropic.com/claude-code 📦 Install Claude Code: npm install -g @anthropic-ai/claude-code ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 💬 DROP A COMMENT: ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ Are you already using Claude Code, or is this your first time? Which free model do you prefer — Qwen or DeepSeek? I read every comment 👇 Subscribe for more DevSecOps and developer tools in 2 minutes 🔔 #ClaudeCode #OpenRouter #AIcoding