FREE AI PATH

by Bootoshi · published JUL 3, 2026 · 4 MIN read · RESOURCES / BEGINNER

run real AI for $0: local models on any laptop + every free cloud tier worth using

you don't need a GPU or a subscription. any 8-16GB laptop runs real AI models locally, and the free cloud tiers hand out thousands of frontier-model requests a day.

BROKE ≠ BLOCKED

Any 8-16GB laptop runs 3-8B models locally. Quantized (Q4_K_M) via LM Studio or Ollama, on Windows, macOS, or Linux - CPU-only is enough.
Phi-4-mini is the starting model. ~3.6GB, MIT license, punches way above its size.
Codex CLI is the free coding agent. Runs on the free ChatGPT tier - Gemini CLI is dead, and Antigravity's free tier is a small weekly cap.
Free API keys stack. Groq 14.4k req/day + Cerebras 1M tokens/day + NVIDIA NIM 40 req/min + OpenRouter = a full dev stack at $0.