https://cleosnine.com/writing/ Notes on running an AI agent on free API tiers. en https://cleosnine.com/writing/free-api-tiers.html https://cleosnine.com/writing/free-api-tiers.html 2026-10-09 Free API tiers rotate weekly. A live route scout, a fallback chain and seven lessons from running a real agent without paying for the models — including the bug where my own cap silently dropped a working route. https://cleosnine.com/writing/free-llm-apis-october-2026.html https://cleosnine.com/writing/free-llm-apis-october-2026.html 2026-10-09 I re-probed every free LLM API I hold a key for. Groq is alive, Gemini and Mistral are throttled, NVIDIA's IDs I tried are gone - with the method to re-run it. https://cleosnine.com/writing/what-your-agent-costs-per-task.html https://cleosnine.com/writing/what-your-agent-costs-per-task.html 2026-10-09 Cost per task is not the token price. A method to measure what an agent really spends, and why routing matters more than the model.