Free Tools & Hosting

Build Smart, Spend Zero You don’t need a budget to get started. These free tools and platforms help you build, test, and even host your AI agents without spending anything.

🆓 Free LLM Access

Tool	Access	Notes
ChatGPT Free Tier	GPT-3.5	Great for prototyping prompts
Claude.ai	Claude Haiku	Fast, context-aware model
Google Bard	Gemini 1.5 Pro (soon)	Web-connected output
Poe.com	Unified interface	Try multiple models in one UI
Perplexity AI	Search + answer	Lightweight research assistant

💻 Free Compute & IDEs

Platform	Use Case	Notes
Google Colab	Notebook-based prototyping	Free GPU support (limited hours)
Kaggle Notebooks	Data science workflows	Also offers free GPU
GitHub Codespaces	Cloud VS Code environment	Great for versioned agent projects
Replit	Browser-based dev environment	Supports Python + hosting
Gitpod	Cloud dev environments	Ideal for multi-repo projects

🧠 Open Source Models

Tool	Type	Notes
HuggingFace Model Hub	OSS model zoo	Everything from LLaMA to Whisper
Ollama	Local model runner	Run LLMs like LLaMA, Mistral locally
GPT4All	Offline chat interface	Use LLMs with no internet
llama.cpp	C++ LLM backend	Efficient CPU-based inference
LocalAI	Self-hosted LLM API	OpenAI-compatible endpoints locally

🧭 Strategy: Start local, test fast, and scale only when needed.