North Mini Code (free) APITESTEDOPEN WEIGHTS256K context

Pricing & specs mirror our live pricing as of July 2026 (pay-as-you-go). Coding score is our own measured result.

What is North Mini Code (free)?

North Mini Code is Cohere's first agentic coding model and the debut of its North family. A sparse mixture-of-experts model with 30B total parameters and 3B active, it is optimized...

North Mini Code (free) on the release timeline

North Mini Code (free) pricing

North Mini Code (free) has a free tier ($0 in / $0 out, rate-limited). Confirm current terms on live pricing before production use.

What North Mini Code (free) costs per month

Cost = input price × input volume + output price × output volume. The same five workloads run on every model page, so any two compare directly.

North Mini Code (free) vs alternatives

When not to use North Mini Code (free)

• It is a heavy reasoner (~30,123 reasoning tokens across our 9 tasks) — slower and pricier per call; avoid it for high-volume, simple requests where a lean model is far cheaper.
• The free tier is rate-limited — route production traffic through a paid model.

Specs

How to call North Mini Code (free)

Copyfrom openai import OpenAI
client = OpenAI(base_url="https://api.datallmlab.com/v1", api_key="YOUR_DATALLM_LAB_KEY")
resp = client.chat.completions.create(
    model="cohere/north-mini-code:free",
    messages=[{"role": "user", "content": "Hello"}],
    # supports tools=[...] and tool_choice
)
print(resp.choices[0].message.content)

Copycurl https://api.datallmlab.com/v1/chat/completions \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"model":"cohere/north-mini-code:free","messages":[{"role":"user","content":"Hello"}]}'

Copyimport OpenAI from "openai";
const client = new OpenAI({ baseURL: "https://api.datallmlab.com/v1", apiKey: process.env.DATALLM_KEY });
const r = await client.chat.completions.create({
  model: "cohere/north-mini-code:free",
  messages: [{ role: "user", content: "Hello" }],
});
console.log(r.choices[0].message.content);

The same key routes North Mini Code (free) and 300+ other models — switch models by changing one string. How OpenAI-compatible APIs work.

Prompting tips for North Mini Code (free)

• State the goal, not every step. North Mini Code (free) reasons internally — give it the objective, constraints and success criteria and let it plan the approach; over-scripting each step tends to lower quality. Turn effort up for hard problems.
• Huge 256K context — but anchor the ask. You can paste whole documents or codebases; models attend most to the start and end, so put the key instruction at the top and restate it after long inputs.
• Give it real tools. Pass a tools=[...] schema instead of asking it to "pretend" — let North Mini Code (free) emit tool calls, execute them, and feed results back for the next turn.

Tips are derived from North Mini Code (free)'s actual capabilities — context window, tool & JSON support, modality and price tier — not generic advice.

Open-source tools for North Mini Code (free)

Popular open-source projects for running and building with North Mini Code (free) — star counts pulled from GitHub (July 2026).

Listed by GitHub stars; inclusion is by ecosystem relevance (inference engines, agent frameworks and SDKs), not affiliation. Stars change — see each repo for current numbers.

Migrating to North Mini Code (free)

Coming from OpenAI or another gateway? On an OpenAI-compatible setup the only changes are base_url → https://api.datallmlab.com/v1 and model → cohere/north-mini-code:free. Messages, streaming, tool calls and the rest of your code stay the same. Routing & failover guide.

Self-host or use the API?

North Mini Code (free) ships open weights (CohereLabs/North-Mini-Code-1.0), so you can run it yourself. Most teams still use the API: no GPU to provision or keep warm, no inference ops, and instant access across multiple providers with automatic failover. Self-host when data residency or fixed per-token economics matter most.

Rate limits & reliability

Rate limits here are the DataLLM Lab gateway's, not the upstream vendor's. On 429 (rate limited) or 503 (provider busy), retry with exponential backoff. See the error-code guide and failover setup.

Related reading

Frequently asked questions