As recorded at collection: Codebuff free tier Freebuff offers free Gemini model calls
As recorded at collection: AI coding assistant Codebuff lets users call multiple AI models at no cost on its Freebuff free tier. As of July 2026, only 2 Google Gemini models actually work; all others are rejected. The author built a relay program that runs on their own computer to use this free tier in regular chatbot apps and shared the process.
- What you get
- Free calls to Gemini-family models
- Price
- To be confirmed
- Valid until
- To be confirmed
- Requirements
- An authentication token is required. Officially, only the dedicated installable program is supported; no public endpoint for external apps is available. Free sessions may have to wait in a queue. Many models listed in the official source, including DeepSeek, GLM, and Kimi, are rejected in practice. Remote-server connections are blocked, so it must run on your own computer.
Details
AI coding assistant Codebuff has a free tier called Freebuff for calling various AI models at no cost. The author's July 2026 tests found that only Google's Gemini 2.5 Flash Lite and Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite Preview were accepted in practice. DeepSeek, MiniMax, GLM, Kimi, and others were all rejected by the server even though they appeared in the public configuration file.
The company officially offers only a dedicated installable program, with no public endpoint for other apps. By analyzing its communications, the author identified four stages: creating a session, starting a run, requesting a conversation, and ending the run. They built a relay program that converts this into a standard format, allowing the free models to be used in regular chat apps such as LobeChat and NextChat.
The server checks the connecting program's identity at the protocol-fingerprint level. Even when the author closely imitated the signals in Cloudflare's remote execution environment, requests were rejected every time for not coming from the dedicated program. Ultimately, only a program running on the author's own computer succeeded. Free sessions may enter a queue depending on conditions, so immediate responses cannot always be expected.
Sources and verification history
- Collection channel
- NodeLoc
- Collected at
- July 27, 2026, 03:37 KST
- First published
- Updated