Routeway free models: limits, keys and failover

What is free on Routeway

Models whose id ends in :free cost nothing. The free plan offers 200 requests a day, access to experimental models, a shared low-priority queue, best-effort availability and one concurrent request. An account and API key are required.

Examples listed as free when we checked: deepseek-v4.1-flash:free , minimax-m3.1-flash:free , gemma-4-26b-a4b-it-chimerax:free . Check the current catalog and your account access. Ficelle refreshes catalog data and applies eligibility checks during selection.

Routeway free-tier limits

Free models allow 200 requests per day, reset at 00:00 UTC, with a 429 past the cap. Routeway calls these hard caps with no way to raise them.

Official pages disagree. Routeway's Rate Limits page gives 5 requests per minute for free models, while its FAQ and Available Models pages say 20.

Get a Routeway API key

Create an account, then an API key from the dashboard. The terms require you to be at least 18.

https://routeway.ai/dashboard

OpenAI compatibility

Chat Completions, Responses and /v1/models are supported, plus the Anthropic Messages format.

https://api.routeway.ai/v1

Data and privacy

Routeway's privacy policy, rechecked on 6 October 2026, says prompts and responses are not stored. Technical error logs exclude message payloads. Automated moderation may check requests before routing, without human review of request content. Upstream providers apply their own data policies.

Through Ficelle, your Routeway key stays on your machine and prompts go straight to Routeway: there is no Ficelle proxy in between.

Before you rely on it

• Keep the :free suffix when diagnosing a limit. Dropping it selects the paid variant, as the FAQ recommends, and changes the cost of the request.
• Free models can be removed at any time, can be unstable, run at lower priority and have no SLA; Routeway intends them for development and testing.
• Requests go to upstream providers whose own data policies apply.
• Several free models are community fine-tunes rather than base models.

Use Routeway with automatic failover

Ficelle can include Routeway behind your local OpenAI-compatible endpoint when the integration is enabled and its models pass free-access and capability checks. Routeway is listed in Ficelle Pro's maintained provider pack. Check your installed configuration, credentials and account entitlement before relying on it. Another eligible candidate must be available for failover to succeed. Local routing guards do not control upstream billing when an account permits paid usage beyond its free allocation. See strict-zero routing and account limits.

# Routeway ships in Ficelle Pro's maintained provider pack.
ficelle doctor --text          # check this install before configuring provider access

from openai import OpenAI

client = OpenAI(base_url="http://127.0.0.1:8646/v1", api_key="ficelle-local")

# Ficelle selects among configured, enabled, eligible models.
# If none can serve the request, it returns an error.
client.chat.completions.create(
    model="ficelle/auto-tools",
    messages=[{"role": "user", "content": "..."}],
)

See what Ficelle Pro includes →

Pick a model type

Choose a model type for your request. Eligibility depends on the installed provider configuration, catalog data, free-access evidence and capability checks. A catalog listing alone does not confirm that your account can call a model.

• Tool calling
• JSON & structured output
• Fast, low-latency
• Reasoning
• Coding assistants
• Agent orchestration
• Long context
• Context compression
• Vision
• Audio input
• Video input
• Multimodal

Questions