[0:00]Cloud Code is one of the best AI coding assistant out there, but nobody talks about the facts that you can run it completely free forever without hitting the anthropic rate limit or paying like 20 a month.
[0:14]And I'm going to show you exactly how to do this in under 5 minutes using open router.
[0:21]I have created a video a couple of days before, how to run Claude Code completely free using Olama, uh but the challenge was like, you know, you need to have uh download uh the model locally and which which consumes a lot of uh memory and you know, it have uh limitation that you cannot run bigger model in your local machines because of the memory and the context it needed.
[0:46]In this tutorial, I'm going to show you something you don't even need to download anything into your local.
[0:51]It's going to be completely, you know, to the internet and you're not running anything from your laptop.
[0:58]We're going to use open router and we are going to use some free models where, you know, there are different models where open router gives and we just need to create an API and we need to call these models uh to your cloud code.
[1:11]So, here's the issue, right? Uh when you uh use Cloud Code Pro, it's like $20 a month and even like if you have heavy API usage, it hits uh you know, like $50 or $200 per month.
[1:25]Or, you know, you have some rate limit that, you know, you cannot use more than, you know, when you're just paying $20.
[1:31]Uh and what we are going to do is like, we are going to use open router, which is 100% free and there are a lot of models which have a completely free, which you can just connect uh using those API keys from an open router.
[1:45]So, OpenRouter is a like a unified API gateway that routes your requests like over 200 AI models.
[1:54]Uh whether it could be from Cloud, Gemini, DeepSeek, you know, Lama or Nvidia, there are different uh you know, models which you can find from the open router and we just need to use the API to get into one of those.
[2:07]So, some of those models are completely free, there are also like paid one, but we will use the free one and there is no billing, no credit card, just an API key.
[2:16]And here are some of the free model which we will be using or we will I can recommend for you to use and uh one of the best one or option one is like OpenRouter free, which is like a set of model which you can automatically roll, because once you set this model OpenRouter free, it can roll it automatically to the request based on the free models available.
[2:39]And uh you don't need to set any specific configuration and you know there are like StepFun, you know 3.5 Flash, which is like 256 context.
[2:48]You also have like NVIDIA uh Metro uh Nemotron, you know which is also good.
[2:55]You also have, you know, uh RCA Liquid uh you know LFM.
[2:59]So there are different uh models which you can see, which are completely free.
[3:02]If you don't have Cloud Code installed on your machine, just run uh the npm install or or there is also the new installation using using curl.
[3:10]I think the npm is more uh deprecated, so you can install Cloud Code and just you check your Cloud Code version, okay?
[3:17]And uh if you're using Windows, you can use WSL or you can install directly on the Windows as well.
[3:23]What we are going to do, we are going to set up a free API key for OpenRouter uh and you know, we are going to use that.
[3:30]So, as I said, open router, uh get an account with that, it's completely free, then you go to, you know, I I already have an API key, but you can just click on create, give a name, you know, um I will give test.
[3:45]Then you can set an expiration or if you don't want to set an expiration, just create it will give you an API key.
[3:51]Just copy this API key which will always start with SK or or, right?
[3:55]So, I will delete this because I already have one.
[3:59]So, once you have the API key, the next step is super simple.
[4:04]Go to your uh cloud setting, settings.json.
[4:08]You can do it in two ways, you can do it uh specific to your project.
[4:11]In my case, you know, I'm inside the project and I have the folder.cloud and you put this setting.json.
[4:20]And what you can do is, then you can set this configuration. What we are basically doing is, we are setting anthropic to route it to the OpenRouter API.
[4:28]And we need to set your uh Open API uh you know, the OpenRouter key here, which we just created.
[4:36]Put it here and then keep this one always blank, you know, anthropic API key.
[4:41]Keep this blank, it's just specifically done it, you know, it's don't remove that line, just keep it blank.
[4:46]Then you define your model.
[4:49]So, you can set the OpenRouter free or you can also set other ones.
[4:53]So, if you want to see some uh models, you know, you can go to the models in OpenRouter and you can see which model is uh best.
[5:01]So, you can see this one have different uh ones which it it automatically route.
[5:05]You can also search for free here and then it will uh list out, you know, different models.
[5:10]So, let me go to here. You can search for free.
[5:15]Then it will list out some free models here. Or other option is you can also come to the categories or, you know, the prompt pricing, you can just uh make it zero, then it will list down.
[5:27]You can see the NVIDIA Lama Nemotron is uh completely free.
[5:32]You can see zero million, $0 per million tokens and $0 for output tokens.
[5:37]So, you can simply uh use this one, you know, uh these would be, you know, the model number if you want to use.
[5:46]There are more here, so you can look at what is available, then you can use one of those.
[5:50]So, basically I would I would like to use the set for the OpenRouter free one, then once you set it, you know, what you can do is, this is my Cloud, okay?
[6:00]You can see it's using Sonnet.
[6:03]Uh and this setting is like a default one which I'm using from my home, but in in this case, I logged in with uh if I remove exit from here and if I log in again with Cloud here, you can see I'm using OpenRouter free because I'm inside this project and I have my.cloud and also my setting.json.
[6:29]If you put the setting.json, uh inside, you know, your home directory, because by default Cloud Code have, you know, setting.json inside your home directory, then it will apply for every Cloud, you know, Cloud Code instance.
[6:40]But for this demo, I'm only setting it to the project and then you can see if I go to model, you can see I'm using OpenRouter free, right?
[6:48]Then you can simply say, you know, uh whatever you want, then it will start, you know, you can see it's asking, what do you want to do?
[6:57]Let me say, what is OpenRouter? Let's ask.
[7:04]You can see it given the output like OpenRouter is API.
[7:07]It's super fast, you know, uh not like your local uh LLM, which you have to download and you need to have a, you know, high CPU and high memory for running it.
[7:20]This is quite fast and you don't need to set up anything locally on this machine.
[7:23]So, I would tell you that, you know, use this method uh to set up your uh Cloud Code, if you want to run uh something free and you don't have to pay for your uh, you know, your Cloud Code uh your instance, right?
[7:38]So, this would be a super helpful setup and I will link all these things to the video description.
[7:44]So, as I said, you know, I had this previous tutorial of Olama, uh downloading this Cloud Code, but as I was telling, you know, it could be uh not that suitable because of the the size and the memory you need, you know, for running it.
[7:59]But this is super great, you know, this is completely simple work.
[8:04]Just few lines of code, in your settings.json and you can start using uh your Cloud Code completely free.
[8:10]So, this is the configuration file which I was saying, you know, put this um anthropic settings into uh into the setting.json, that's it.
[8:18]Then you have a zero model. You can also run with hyphen hyphen model uh once you set up the router API, but I will prefer, you know, you set up your model uh in the anthropic model by default.
[8:29]Then you can you don't have to make any changes, you can just set it up there.
[8:34]Super great, right? I hope you liked this video and you're uh, you know, you can completely functional AI assistant at zero cost and I'm sure, you know, uh you like this, you try this one out and drop a comment, you know, if you're already using Cloud Code or if this is your first time.
[8:52]Let me know if this video helps you and uh if you need any help on setting up, I'm always ready to help you, just put a comment into the video comment section if you face some problems.
[9:02]The full instructions, you know, as I was showing, you know, it's available in the video, I will put it into the video description, just uh copy paste the uh uh the template and just put it to your settings on JSON.
[9:12]Subscribe to my channel for uh more uh videos.
[9:17]And uh, you know, if you want to see more videos like DevOps or DevSecOps, you know, subscribe to my channel, also like this video so that it can reach out to more uh people and I will see you in the next video.
