Guide
Use an uncensored model in OpenHands
OpenHands connects to unrestricted.sh through its OpenAI-compatible provider, and one command sets it up. You get Qwen3.8 27B Uncensored, MiMo V2.6 Flash Uncensored, GLM-5.3 Flash Uncensored and DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 Uncensored for coding and chat, with up to 1M context, from $0.35 per million input tokens.
Get an API key
Sign up and go: your $0.50 of welcome credit works on the API right away, no top-up needed. A first top-up of $10 or more adds $5 of bonus credit.
Connect OpenHands
sh -c "$(curl -fsSL https://unrestricted.sh/setup.sh)"Or with npm: npx unrestricted
Run it in a terminal and approve the connection in your browser. It creates an API key for this machine, asks which tools to set up, and writes the OpenHands settings to ~/.openhands/agent_settings.json, leaving the rest of that file as it was. It needs Node 18 or newer, and the macOS/Linux command also needs curl.
Already have a key? Set UNRESTRICTED_API_KEY to it first and the browser step is skipped. Put UNRESTRICTED_TOOLS=openhands in front of the command to set up only OpenHands.
Or set it up by hand
This writes ~/.openhands/agent_settings.json when you have none yet. Run it with UNRESTRICTED_API_KEY set and your shell fills in the key. If the file already exists, it is left alone: run /settings in OpenHands, choose Advanced, and enter the model and base_url values above as the Custom Model and Base URL, with your key as the API Key.
mkdir -p ~/.openhands
[ -e ~/.openhands/agent_settings.json ] || cat > ~/.openhands/agent_settings.json <<EOF
{
"llm": {
"model": "openai/qwen3.8-27b-uncensored",
"api_key": "$UNRESTRICTED_API_KEY",
"base_url": "https://api.unrestricted.sh/v1",
"usage_id": "agent",
"max_input_tokens": 262144,
"max_output_tokens": 32768
},
"system_prompt_kwargs": {
"cli_mode": true
},
"condenser": {
"kind": "LLMSummarizingCondenser",
"llm": {
"model": "openai/qwen3.8-27b-uncensored",
"api_key": "$UNRESTRICTED_API_KEY",
"base_url": "https://api.unrestricted.sh/v1",
"usage_id": "condenser",
"max_input_tokens": 262144,
"max_output_tokens": 32768
},
"max_size": 80,
"keep_first": 4
},
"kind": "Agent"
}
EOF
chmod 600 ~/.openhands/agent_settings.jsonPick the model
Run openhands. It starts on Qwen3.8 27B Uncensored.
If something goes wrong
- 401 invalid_api_key
- Missing or revoked API key.
- 402 insufficient_funds
- Out of funds.
- 403 api_locked
- Add funds once to unlock API keys.
- 429 concurrent_request_limit
- Too many requests running on this account.
Every error the API returns is listed in the API reference.
What a session costs
Cached input: when your tool resends the start of a conversation, those tokens cost $0.10 per million instead of $1.00. Cached-input pricing applies to the API and coding tools; messages in the web chat pay the full input price.
A coding-agent turn with 60,000 tokens in, 55,000 of them cached, 1,500 out costs $0.0135. The pricing page has every price and more examples.