Recently I made a video showing how to use Claude Code for free by routing local open-source models through Anthropic’s API compatibility layer. The idea is great on paper, but the reality is most of us are on consumer-grade hardware: big models barely run, inference is painfully slow, and you end up paying in hardware and energy anyway. So in this video I come back with a better option: run Claude Code for free, but powered by the cloud using OpenRouter—no expensive GPU, no local setup headaches. I walk you through the exact setup: install Claude Code, create an OpenRouter account, generate an API key, and then set the environment variables (bash, Windows, or WSL). The key detail is you must explicitly set the Anthropic API key to be empty, otherwise it can conflict. From there, you pick a model from OpenRouter (there are 39 free models), and I recommend nvidia/nemotron-3-super-120b-a12b:free because it’s insanely capable for a free option. Once configured, you can verify via /status and start building—like the SaaS landing page I generated—while still getting agentic features like sub-agents, parallel tasks, web search, file discovery, and research workflows. It’s basically full agentic development, for free.