Hello legends — in this video I tested a super practical way to run Claude Code completely for free by plugging it into OpenRouter. The whole point is: no local models, no GPU, and no “do I have enough RAM/VRAM?” drama. That means it works on basically any computer, including a Raspberry Pi or a tiny VPS where you don’t have space to download anything. Instead of paying for the default Claude models inside Claude Code, I just point the Anthropic base URL to OpenRouter and use a free cloud model. I walk through the exact setup: create an OpenRouter API key, then drop a few variables into a .claude/settings.json file (local to one project) or your global Claude config (so every project uses it). I also show the reality of free models: some of them get rate-limited (I hit that with Qwen 3 Coder 480B), so the better move is using the OpenRouter “free models router,” which routes your request to whatever’s available and actually works reliably. Finally, I show how easy it is to flip to a paid-but-cheap coding model like MiniMax M2.5 when you want better performance and still don’t want Opus/Sonnet pricing.