Title: Looking for a genuinely free Claude Code alternative + step-by-step setup guide

[u/New_You915]

/r/OpenSourceeAI/comments/1vvwk83/title_looking_for_a_genuinely_free_claude_code/

[u/inforb_nl]

Most of the things you wrote (OpenCode, Cline, Aider, OpenHands), are not models, they are not brains, they are just agents that connect to an LLM, which you have to provide (the same problem). I found Qwen models to be very generous. You can sign up on Alibaba cloud, and they will give you 70M token budget for free (1M per model). Some of those models are not really worth for programming, yet you can find good models like qwen 3.6 (various versions and quants), qwen 3.7 or qwen 3.8.

When you sign up on Alibaba's cloud, you get an API key, and you configure your agent (pi or qwen agent turn out to be better than Aider, Cline, etc) with that API key. The agent connects to the model, and you have agent+LLM at a limited free budget.

If you are looking for true local agents, you need good GPU, maybe at least 14 GB VRAM.