I've been using Openrouter for Claude Sonnet 4 for a long time now and I just can't afford it anymore. I go through like $5 a day or two just to role play. I've tried SO many free alternatives.
0324 Deepseek or v4 are the only 'okay' ones, but no matter what I do (ooc's, 1*s, chat memory, etc), it speaks and acts for me a lot.
Unless I'm doing something wrong, I've tried nearly the whole free list of LiteRouter, $1 tier of Meganova and a good amount of the free ones on Openrouter and I don't know if I'm doing something wrong. I get complete nonsense, symbols, emojis and random 'scenes' of different characters or the bot will write a novel of random words until I force it to stop.
So I guess unless there's a good way to find free ones that people understandably gatekeep, does anyone have a cheap alternative to Claude? It's so beautifully written but it's SO expensive!