FreeTheAI Python SDK

freetheai is the official Python 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.

pip install freetheai

from freetheai import FreeTheAI

client = FreeTheAI()  # reads FREETHEAI_API_KEY

reply = client.chat.completions.create(
    model="fta/zai/glm-5.3",
    messages=[{"role": "user", "content": "Write a haiku about open models."}],
)
print(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 raise an error with the partial text instead of returning a short answer.
• Daily check-in and daily limits raise 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

• Getting started: key, check-in, first request
• Chat and streaming: messages, streaming, reasoning, parameters
• Tool calls: function calling, step by step
• Web search: search results and sourced answers
• Errors: every error class and when it happens

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