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FreeTheAI JavaScript SDK

FreeTheAI JavaScript SDK

freetheai is the official JavaScript and TypeScript client for FreeTheAI, a free OpenAI-compatible AI API. One key gives you dozens of chat models, streaming, tool calls, web search with sourced answers, and image and video tasks. It has no runtime dependencies: it uses the global fetch and runs on Node.js 18+, Bun, Deno, and modern browsers.

npm install freetheai

import { FreeTheAI } from "freetheai";

const client = new FreeTheAI(); // reads FREETHEAI_API_KEY

const reply = await client.chat.completions.create({
  model: "fta/zai/glm-5.3",
  messages: [{ role: "user", content: "Write a haiku about open models." }],
});
console.log(reply.choices[0]?.message.content);

Why use it instead of a generic OpenAI client

The client is written around how the FreeTheAI API actually behaves, so your code gets answers instead of retry logic:

  • Busy models are retried after the server's Retry-After, or skipped for the next of your fallback models.
  • The per-account concurrency limit is learned on the first refusal; extra calls wait their turn instead of failing.
  • Long replies are fetched as a stream and assembled, so they never hit an idle timeout.
  • Cut-off streams throw an error with the partial text instead of returning a short answer.
  • Daily check-in and daily limits throw their own errors at once, with the link or reset time you need.
  • Typos in model IDs come back with suggestions, and a missing fta/ prefix is fixed for you.

The full list is on Reliability.

Where to next

Need help? Ask in Discord and include the errorId from the error.