Claude Setup and Power User Skills
Run Claude Code For Free
A 26,000-star GitHub proxy reroutes Claude Code through free open-source models: NVIDIA NIM, OpenRouter, DeepSeek, Ollama. Same CLI, no subscription.
A 26,000-star GitHub proxy reroutes Claude Code traffic through free open-source models: NVIDIA NIM, OpenRouter, DeepSeek, Ollama. You keep the same Claude Code CLI, the same commands, the same workflows. No subscription bill. Works cleanly for the majority of everyday coding tasks, and you can switch back to Anthropic for anything that requires Claude's full reasoning capability.
How to do it
- 1Clone the proxy repo from GitHub (26,000 or more stars, MIT license, actively maintained)
- 2Choose your free model backend: OpenRouter gives access to multiple models including DeepSeek and GPT-4o-mini. NVIDIA NIM is fast and free. Ollama runs locally
- 3Configure `~/.claude/settings.json` to point Claude Code at the proxy endpoint instead of api.anthropic.com
- 4Run `claude --version` to confirm Claude Code picks up the new endpoint correctly
- 5Test with a simple coding task: file creation, refactoring, bug fix. Most Claude Code commands work without any modification
- 6Keep Anthropic as your fallback for complex tasks: multi-file architecture decisions, novel debugging, long-context reasoning
Why it works
The proxy does not replace Claude's capabilities, it makes the tool accessible for the 70% of tasks where a free model is sufficient. You pay for Claude when it matters and get the convenience of the Claude Code workflow for free on everything else.
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