List of Free LLM AIs for Coding (February 2026)
Posted by Al Sweigart in misc
Large language models (LLMs), the generative AIs that respond to text-based questions, can be a useful resource for learning to program. This blog post is a simple list of LLM services that are free, do not require a credit card to use, and have a web interface. I'll update this blog post from time to time. Assume that free services may have daily usage limits, and that sites that don't require registration may limit how much you can use them before signing up for a free account.
My rough top recommendations for coding tutors are ChatGPT, Claude, and DeepSeek, but here are the acceptable free AI services I've found:
- ChatGPT (from OpenAI) - No registration required.
- Claude (from Anthropic) - Free account registration required.
- DeepSeek (from DeepSeek) - Free account registration required.
- Duck.ai (from DuckDuckGo) - No registration required. Uses other AI companies' models but acts as an anonymous relay. (This is not verfied.)
- Gemini (from Google) - No registration required.
- Copilot (from Microsoft) - No registration required.
- Perplexity (from Perplexity) - Free account registration required (though at first it looks like no registration required.)
- Meta (from Meta / Facebook) - No registration required (though they ask for your birth year.)
- Poe (from Twitch.tv) - Free account registration required.
- Mistral (from Mistral AI) - No registration required.
- Grok (from X / Twitter) - Free account registration required.
I have slight recommendations against the following:
- Shiori (from Shiori.ai) - Free account registration required. Uses other AI companies' models. I don't recommend it because this probably means their business model is personal information collection. They may be fine, but they don't have the reputation of DuckDuckGo for privacy.
