💰 Higher Token Costs, Reduced Credits
Providers are hiking token prices while slashing free credits and allowances—GitHub Copilot being a prime example, where users now burn through entire monthly quotas on single tasks that previously consumed a fraction.
Luckly, there are still plenty left.
Here is some more free APIs and more coding agents (that seem actually good)
✅ FREE Coding Agents, APIs
Poolside
What: Coding agent + API
Link: poolside.ai/get-started
Status: Currently free
I Use their CLI agent to update docs automatically while I worked on other things. Solid so far.
Mistral Vibe CLI
What: CLI coding assistant
Link: mistral.ai - look for the Vibe CLI, it has higher rate limits vs the other stuff
Install:
curl -LsSf https://mistral.ai/vibe/install.sh | bash
Status: Free up to a request/time cap
Common knock on Mistral: "it sucks." My experience: replies instantly, handles terminal commands, automations, and scripting just fine. Perfectly adequate for lightweight tasks.
Nvidia NIM
What: Free hosted models with rate limits
Link: build.nvidia.com/nvidia
Status: Free (rate-limited)
Haven't stress-tested the limits yet.
Tool I built: An endpoint liveness checker — paste an OpenAI-compatible /v1/models URL (optional key), and it pings every model to log which ones respond and when. Useful for figuring out if a "free" resource is actually reliable enough to use. (Buggy right now, fix coming soon — don't use real keys yet.)
Opencode Zen & Go models: Some may work without an API key. If not, one key covers both Zen and Go — free models, zero cost. Opencode Go is a coding plan/subscription for $5/$10, I used up my entire alotment in like one week though.. with lite use
💵 CHEAP - All close to or less than $1/M
Minimax (M3 / 2.7 / 2.5) — API is extremely reliable. When I had a sub, even the lowest tier let me run tons of subagents without hitting limits. Prices may have increased; re-evaluating API vs. subscription.
Deepseek v4 — Free flash models using Opencode Zen's free models and some other ways like thru Cline, Kilo Code endpoints. Cheap pro/flash. Reasonix CLI agent works well! I am using it a lot.
StepFun Flash 3.7 — Inexpensive, strong at tool-use and agentic workflows.
Arcee AI Trinity -- inexpensive models, USA based. All less than a dollar input/output per M tokens. Good with agentic tools.
🗂️ Coding Plan Picks
- Minimax → ⭐ Best option (if pricing/limits haven't changed)
- Opencode Go → Ran out in ~1 week. Raw API + free models is probably cheaper.
🤖 New Agent Harnesses
- Reasonix — specifically for Deepseek v4 — it is good! Been using it a lot
- Mistral Vibe — higher rate limits for free, haven't ran into limits yet
- Poolside Pool — totally free to use right now! Works good, might not be the most intelligent, but great for creating docs and doing tasks
🧰 Misc Tools
Kilo Code
VS Code extension with plenty of free models available all the time. You can even use its API endpoints in other tools/apps.
CLIProxyAPI
A tool that lets you stack providers for fallbacks and convert between OpenAI and Anthropic style endpoints, so you can use any model in Claude Code. I tried and tested this thing well — no issues with formatting the API correctly, no errors in Claude Code.
Buttons CLI
buttonscli.com — This terminal app can be controlled by AI coding agents via MCP or CLI, letting agents control multiple terminal tabs while you watch what they're doing (which is hard when using them in terminals since it only shows short summaries). Has agent stalling detection and nudging to get back to working.