You do not need one account per model. One gateway key can reach dozens of providers, with free capacity used first and automatic fallback when a provider runs out. The accounts you are maintaining are mostly overhead for choice you never exercise.
If you try a new model every few months, you probably have a folder full of API keys. Each one comes with its own dashboard, its own quota counter, and its own billing relationship. The question worth asking is not which provider is strongest. It is whether you need a separate relationship with every provider at all.
The direct cost is money, but that is rarely the part that hurts. The recurring cost is bookkeeping. You have to remember which account still has free credits, which one expired, which password goes with which dashboard, and which card is attached to which invoice.
Free tiers make this worse by design. They are meant to get you in the door, and they change without notice. The provider decides how long the allowance lasts and what happens when it runs out, and there is no obligation to tell you in advance. OpenRouter, for example, publishes a free tier of 50 requests per day that rises to 1,000 once you have purchased $10 in credits (OpenRouter FAQ). That is one provider’s policy. Multiply the uncertainty across every dashboard you own and the bookkeeping becomes the real overhead.
A model gateway puts a single endpoint in front of many providers. You hold one credential, and the gateway decides which upstream handles each request.
FreeModel is one of these. It routes to dozens of providers behind one API key, tries providers with free capacity first, and falls back to the next one when a provider fails or exhausts its quota. The model list is public and needs no key to read, and the API is OpenAI-compatible, so existing clients work without changes.
The practical difference is the shape of your configuration. Instead of N base URLs, N keys, and N retry policies, you have one of each. When a provider goes down, that is the gateway’s problem rather than yours.
It is worth being precise about what this does not do. A gateway does not make capacity unlimited, and it does not make a free tier permanent. It aggregates the same constraints you would otherwise manage by hand.
The closest well-known option is OpenRouter. It publishes 445 models through its own API (OpenRouter models endpoint) and charges a 5.5% fee on credit purchases, with a $0.80 minimum (OpenRouter FAQ).
LiteLLM takes a different approach. It is a library rather than a hosted endpoint, and it advertises support for 100+ providers (LiteLLM README). You run it yourself, which means you also own its operations.
The tradeoff is consistent across all three. Managed gateways move operational work off your plate and add a dependency. Self-hosted ones keep control and hand the operations back to you. Neither is strictly better; they fail in different directions.
A gateway is the wrong layer for some jobs, and it is worth saying so plainly.
If you need a contractual SLA with a specific provider, go direct. The gateway can only pass through the guarantees it receives, and the free-first routing that makes it useful is also what makes its behavior hard to pin down.
If your results have to be reproducible — the same request returning the same model version next month — a routing layer works against you. The whole point is that it may choose a different upstream, and that is a feature in some contexts and a defect in others.
If your data has to stay in a specific jurisdiction or under a specific agreement, aggregating providers makes the compliance story harder, not easier.
A short walkthrough of the same argument, including what the signup problem looks like in practice:
Video: How Many AI Accounts Have You Signed Up For?
Count the accounts you are maintaining. If that number keeps growing while your actual usage stays flat, you are paying overhead for choice you are not exercising. One endpoint with free-first routing covers most of that ground, and the cases where it does not are specific enough to name in advance.