Free models are not useless; they are just rate-limited. The moment you try to run something real against them, you hit a wall: a 429 that arrives exactly when you need an answer. The standard advice is to pay your way out. This article takes the opposite path: build a small proxy that spreads your workload across several free endpoints, including the one from MonkeyCode, and treat rate limits as a scheduling problem instead of a budget problem.
Disclosure: This article was prepared as part of MonkeyCode's product outreach.
MonkeyCode is an open-source project that currently offers free model access with a token allowance (10 million tokens at the time of writing) and a free server option. I use it here as one of the upstreams in the proxy. The pattern works with any free tier, so you are not locked in.
The Proxy Pattern
Think of a proxy as a traffic controller. Your app sends one request to the proxy, and the proxy decides which upstream model actually handles it. The upstreams are free tiers you have collected from various providers. Each one has its own quota, latency, and failure modes. The proxy's job is to hide that complexity behind a single endpoint.
