Free Claude Opus and GPT-6 Astra API credit: what $50 on AgentRouter actually buys
A gateway that gives new accounts $50 of credit across six frontier models — and rations the Claude and GPT ones into two batches a day. The per-model prices, how far the credit goes on each, and the error you will hit when a batch runs dry.
Search for free Claude or GPT API access and you will find a wall of pages promising something that does not exist. AgentRouter is one of the few that does exist, and it is worth understanding precisely, because what it gives you is real and what it takes away is not advertised.
Everything below was read on 13 September 2026 from AgentRouter's own endpoints, not from its marketing. The credit figure comes from its `/api/status` response, the prices are derived from the ratios in `/api/pricing` using the formula its own pricing table uses, and the rationing comes from its announcement board.
What you actually get
Registering through a referral link credits the new account $50, and the person who referred you the same $50. That figure is not a marketing claim — the site returns `quota_for_invitee: 25000000` against a `quota_per_unit` of 500000, and its own code renders a quota as quota divided by quota_per_unit in dollars. That is $50.00.
Signing in each day adds another $25, per an announcement dated 15 October 2025. Email verification is not required, and GitHub or LinuxDO sign-in both work.
The six models, and what $50 buys on each
AgentRouter's pricing table computes the input price as the model's ratio times two dollars per million tokens, and the output price as that times the completion ratio. Applying its own formula to its own published ratios gives this:
- deepseek-v4-flash — $2 per million in, $6 out. $50 buys about 25 million input tokens.
- gpt-5.6-sol — $3 in, $15 out. About 16.7 million.
- claude-opus-5 — $4 in, $20 out. About 12.5 million.
- glm-5.3 — $5 in, $25 out. About 10 million.
- gpt-6-astra — $6 in, $30 out. About 8.3 million.
- claude-opus-4-8 — $8 in, $40 out. About 6.25 million.
Those token figures are input only. Real usage mixes input and output, and output costs three to five times more, so treat them as a ceiling rather than a forecast. The practical read is that the same $50 goes four times further on DeepSeek than on the most expensive Claude.
The catch: Claude and GPT are rationed
This is the part that does not appear on any of the round-up pages, and it changes what the credit is worth.
An announcement dated 28 August 2026 states that the Claude and GPT models are now released in limited daily batches — two a day, at 07:00 and 19:00 Beijing time, which is 11:00 and 23:00 UTC — on a first-come, first-served basis. When a batch is exhausted the API returns a specific error:
402 Budget pool quota has been exhausted.You then wait for the next batch, or switch models. DeepSeek and GLM are not rationed, and the announcement explicitly names them as the fallback. So the credit is real, but on the frontier models it is credit against a queue rather than an allowance you can spend when you like.
The setup mistake almost everyone makes
AgentRouter speaks two protocols, and they use different base URLs. Anthropic-shaped clients use the bare host; OpenAI-shaped clients use the same host with /v1 on the end. Getting that wrong is the single most common reason a key appears not to work.
# Anthropic-compatible
https://agentrouter.org
# OpenAI-compatible
https://agentrouter.org/v1It matters more than it looks, because two of the six models are OpenAI-endpoint only. gpt-5.6-sol and gpt-6-astra will not answer on the Anthropic base URL at all, so putting either in a Claude Code config produces a failure that looks like a broken key and is not.
Rules that will get you banned
- Registering in bulk to farm credit.
- Reselling or sharing accounts and credit.
- Fake referrals.
- Automated abuse and deliberately working around limits.
All four are listed on the site's own notice board as bannable, with the blocked list published in their Discord. One account per person.
Is it worth it?
For learning an agent CLI, testing a prompt against six models, or running something small and non-urgent: yes, clearly. $50 is a genuine amount of tokens and there is nothing to pay.
For anything with a deadline or a customer attached: no, and the operator agrees. Keep a DeepSeek or GLM fallback configured, because those are the two that keep answering when a batch runs dry.
AgentRouter
$50 of free API credit on AgentRouter
$50 FREE CREDIT
Sources
AgentRouter's /api/status and /api/pricing endpoints and its announcement board, all read on 13 September 2026, plus its six published client setup guides. Prices are derived from its own published ratios using the formula in its own pricing table. Ratios change — check the live table before relying on a figure here.
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