핵심 요약
Claude Code 환경에 OpenRouter의 무료 모델(Stealth Ox Alpha)을 연동하여 비용 없이 코딩 어시스턴트를 사용하는 방법을 소개한다. OpenRouter 계정에서 API 키를 발급받은 뒤 Claude Code 설정 파일 하나만 수정하면 간단히 적용할 수 있다. 단, 설정을 강제로 덮어쓰는 Claude Code 데스크톱 앱에서는 사용할 수 없다.
주요 포인트
- **Claude Code 무료 사용:** Claude 대신 OpenRouter에서 제공하는 무료 모델(Stealth Ox Alpha)을 연동해 완전 무료로 실행
- **간단한 설정 방식:** OpenRouter 가입 후 API 키를 발급받아 Claude Code 내부 설정 파일 1개만 수정하면 연동 완료
- **데스크톱 앱 제한:** 데스크톱 앱 버전은 자체 모델 설정을 강제 덮어쓰기하므로 해당 방식을 적용할 수 없음
- **다양한 무료 모델 탐색:** OpenRouter에서 제공하는 500개 이상의 모델 중 입력/출력 비용이 0달러인 무료 모델 검색 및 활용 가능
- **실제 무료 사용 검증:** 하루 동안 6,160만 토큰을 사용했음에도 실제 지출 비용이 0달러임을 직접 확인 및 인증
Right now, I've got all these different Claude Code tabs running for completely free. Because right here, you can see that the model I'm using isn't Claude, it's Stealth Ox Alpha, but I'm using it within the Cloud Code harness. So, today I'm going to show you guys how you actually can set this up so you can use free models inside of Cloud Code. And then I'm going to talk about if it actually works and how good the stuff is. I'm going to show you guys everything and share my honest thoughts. So, let's not waste any time and just get straight to this one. So, right now I'm inside of Herk 2, which is my AI operating system. It's my second brain with all my business context. And I've got chats running in here for completely free. So, let me show you exactly how you actually get this set up. It's super simple. All you need to do is get an open router account and then you just need to change one file inside of cloud code. What you're going to have to do here is if you're using cloud code in the desktop app, you can't do this in the desktop app. The reason is because the desktop app overrides these settings and forces you to use a cloud model, which honestly makes sense. So, what you're going to do first is you're going to go to open router.ai. If you haven't used this before, it basically lets you have one API key that can route to tons of different models. As you can see, there are 500 plus AI models on this site. If I go to the models, you can start to see that we've got certain ones that are paid, like Deepseek, which is still very cheap, or this new one that just dropped today, which is what inspired me to make this video, called OX Alpha. As you can see, it's $0 per million input tokens and $0 per million output tokens. You can also come in here and you can search for something like free, and you can see how many models in here are free. Now, obviously, this comes with some, you know, fine prints. Maybe they've got rate limits, maybe they got a limit per day or whatever it is, but there's a lot of free models in here that you can play around with. And of course, they've got the ones that we all love and know. So if I go to for example Claude, you can see that there's Opus 5. You can see that there's Fable 5. And also same thing with like GBT and Gemini. It's got all the models in here. So that's step one is to create an account. And then all you're going to have to do is go to your actual account over here. You're going to go to credits. And this is where you need to basically grab an API key. So you'll go to API keys and you'll go ahead and create a new key. And in just a sec, we will actually start to use that. Now, just to show you guys that this is coming through free. If I go over here to my where is it? my activity. You can see that my top API keys, it'll show this stealth test one, I've used 61.6 million tokens just today by testing this out. And if I go to my total spend and I come over here to today, you can see that for OX Alpha, it did cost me about 13 cents total after all of that. But this was after using it pretty much all day and running through tons and tons of tokens, testing things out with it. Okay, so you see where to get an API key. You see an open router this model called Ox Alpha. It's from a company called Stealth. So, if you want to read more about it, you can click onto here and go to the stealth model terms and you can read about this a little bit. But this is basically an anonymous model provider. So, we don't know exactly where it came from. We don't know if it's Chinese or not. So, think about carefully like what data you're putting in here. If it's really sensitive data, then you probably don't want to give it to an anonymous AI provider. That's not the point of this video. The point of this video is just showing you how to get it set up and how it works, my honest thoughts on it. So, all we have to do is we are going to go into a project. We're going to do this in VS Code. So if you typically are a desktop user for cloud code, you're just going to have to do download some sort of IDE or you could run this in the terminal if you want, but if you download VS Code, it's completely free and then you just open up the terminal in here or the cloud code extension and you use cloud code, then you will be able to do this. So inside of your cloud, we typically have a settings file. So right here is my settings file and inside the settings file, we have uh a section called env. So kind of like environment variables. Now, in here, what you need to put in is this stuff. I'm going to copy and paste this into the description of this current YouTube video. You'll grab that. You'll put it right into your environment variables inside of your settings file. And all you're going to have to switch out is your enthropic o token. And this is actually just going to be your open router key. So you'll go back into open router. You'll go to your activity like I showed you. You'll go to your API keys rig