I'm getting consistently good results with Gemini CLI and the free 100 requests per day and 6 million tokens per day.
Note that you'll need to either authorize with a Google Account or with an API key from AI Studio, just be sure the API key is from an account where billing is disabled.
Also note that there are other rate limits for tokens per request and tokens per minute on the free plan that effectively prevent you from using the whole million token context window.
It's good to exit or /clear frequently so every request doesn't resubmit your entire history as context or you'll use up the token limits long before you hit 100 requests in a day.
I'm getting consistently good results with Gemini CLI and the free 100 requests per day and 6 million tokens per day.
Note that you'll need to either authorize with a Google Account or with an API key from AI Studio, just be sure the API key is from an account where billing is disabled.
Also note that there are other rate limits for tokens per request and tokens per minute on the free plan that effectively prevent you from using the whole million token context window.
It's good to exit or /clear frequently so every request doesn't resubmit your entire history as context or you'll use up the token limits long before you hit 100 requests in a day.
Doesn't it swap to a lower power model after that?
Not automatically but you can switch to a lower power model and access more free requests. I think Gemini 2.5 Flash is 250 requests per day.