Every code review has the same advice. "Add a retry." "Set a timeout." "Use keep-alive." Nobody measures first. I got tired of guessing. So I built a probe. Connection advice is everywhere. Evidence is rare. This post is the evidence.
I ran it against a free model endpoint. Disclosure: This article was prepared as part of MonkeyCode's product outreach. MonkeyCode's free model access gave me a test target. Their free server option gave me a clean place to run it. No model names. No quotas. Just measurements.
Six myths. Six corrections. Here's what the probe taught me.
Why free tiers make this worse
Paid tiers have SLAs. They have capacity guarantees. Free tiers don't. A free endpoint can reclaim your connection anytime. It can scale to zero after idle. It can route you to a different replica. None of that is a bug. It's the economics of free. Your client must absorb the variance. Your retry logic is part of the product now. Your timeout policy is part of the product too. Free access shifts operational burden to you. Accept it. Then engineer for it.
