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BS “These three websites gave me 500+ AI API keys for free” — 500 models behind one key exists; 500 free keys doesn’t, and ‘keys you didn’t create’ is credential abuse
The claim“These three websites gave me 500+ AI API keys for free! I found a way — Get 500+ AI API keys.” (Comment-gated for the list; 87 comments.)
No legitimate service hands out 500 API keys. The number almost certainly comes from Puter.js marketing — ‘One API for 500+ AI models’ — which is 500 MODELS behind ONE key on a user-pays gateway, a completely different thing. The real free landscape is modest and single-key: OpenRouter’s free models (~50 requests/day base), Groq’s free tier, Google AI Studio’s Gemini tier (~500 free requests/day) — free TIERS you sign up for yourself, with daily caps measured in dozens to hundreds of requests. The dark side of this genre is real: GitHub lists that offer working ‘keys’ you didn’t create are trafficking in scraped or stolen credentials — the practice security vendors call LLMjacking — and there’s a documented case of one stolen cloud key racking up $82,314 in charges in 24 hours. Twelve thousand-plus real keys have been found exposed in public repos. Either the video means free tiers (three keys, not 500) or it means keys that belong to someone else.
What holds up
- Real free tiers exist and are useful: Google AI Studio, Groq, and OpenRouter each hand you a legitimate key in minutes
- The ‘500+’ number matches real marketing — Puter.js’s ‘One API for 500+ AI models’ — so the video likely garbles a real product
- Directory repos of free-tier signups (e.g. free-llm-api-resources) genuinely exist
What doesn’t
- ‘500+ keys’ conflates models-behind-one-key with keys — nothing legitimate provides 500 keys
- Any source handing you working keys you didn’t generate is a stolen-credential list — LLMjacking — with real legal and financial exposure ($82K in 24 hours in one documented case)
- The actual free tiers cap at dozens-to-hundreds of requests a day — nobody is running a business on them
The catch
The honest version of this video is ‘three sites give you three free-tier keys with daily caps.’ That doesn’t go viral, so the number got multiplied by 100 — and the only way the multiplied version is literally true is theft.
How to actually do it
- Create your own free-tier keys at Google AI Studio, Groq, and OpenRouter — five minutes, fully legitimate
- Never use an API key you didn’t generate; treat keys as tier-zero secrets and rotate any that leak
- If you need many models behind one key, that product exists honestly — a gateway like OpenRouter — and you still pay for what you use
Free tiers are real and small; ‘500+ free keys’ is either a garbled gateway pitch or stolen credentials. Nothing in between.
- Confidence
- High
- Posted by
- Learninwithak
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