Most people leave Claude Code over the meter. Anthropic publishes no number for any plan, your terminal and your Claude chats drain one shared pool, and the weekly cap fell on 14 September when a summer boost ended. The rest leave over lock-in: Claude models only, closed source, and a Pro or Max login that works only in Anthropic's own apps.
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Stay on Claude Code if you hand it long multi-file tasks every day and rarely hit the limit, or you have not yet run /usage, which shows which skills, subagents and MCP servers are eating the allowance you would be leaving over.
checked 2026-10-13 · Claude Code is Not sold separately, it comes with a paid Claude plan. Pro is $20/mo billed monthly or $17/mo billed annually ($200 upfront). Max is $100/mo (5x Pro usage) or $200/mo (20x), monthly billing only. Team is $25/seat/mo standard ($20 annual) or $125 premium ($100 annual). Or pay per token with an API key or through Amazon Bedrock, Google Cloud or Microsoft Foundry. · by dan scutaru
better: Same job, same $20 with ChatGPT Plus, but OpenAI prints an estimate: 15 to 160 local messages per five hours on GPT-6.1 Sol. The CLI is Apache licensed, and /import copies your Claude Code skills, hooks, MCP servers and up to 50 recent chats.
you give up: The estimate spans a factor of ten and weekly limits may apply on top. ChatGPT Work, image generation and ChatGPT for Excel draw on the same allowance, so the shared pool comes with you. No Claude models.
better: A meter you can read. Pro is $10 for 1,500 AI credits at $0.01 each, Claude Opus 5.5 costs what it does on Anthropic's API ($4 in, $20 out per million tokens), completions are unlimited, and the CLI works on the Free plan.
you give up: Agent work burns credits fast: at Anthropic's own average of about $13 per developer per active day, Pro lasts about a day before you pay per credit. Its Claude and Codex agents start at Pro+, $39.
better: Keeps Claude Code itself: point it at Z.ai's Anthropic-compatible endpoint and GLM-5.3 runs behind your CLAUDE.md, skills and hooks. From $18 a month, with published credit quotas per five hours and per week.
you give up: It is not Claude, and Anthropic does not support Claude Code on non-Claude models, so you are on your own when an update breaks something. Z.ai scales concurrency to available capacity and gives no refunds.
better: MIT licensed, takes 75+ providers or a local model through Ollama or LM Studio, and falls back to your CLAUDE.md and ~/.claude/skills, so a Claude Code repo mostly works on day one. Go is $10 a month for open models, now with Claude Haiku 5.5.
you give up: Your Pro or Max login does not work here because Anthropic prohibits it, so Opus and Sonnet bill per token. Go caps each model too: about 110 requests per five hours on Kimi K3.
better: Apache licensed, in VS Code and a CLI, with Ollama or LM Studio for local models. It can also drive your installed Claude Code as a provider, so your Pro or Max plan keeps working in a different interface.
you give up: In that mode responses may not stream, and image uploads and prompt caching are limited. Its docs want 64GB of RAM or more for larger local models, and JetBrains is Enterprise only.
better: Minimal and MIT licensed, from Earendil. It loads your CLAUDE.md and AGENTS.md, works with Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, OpenRouter, Ollama and about a dozen other providers, and you add only the features you want. One Hacker News user who tried OpenCode first found it lighter.
you give up: No subagents or plan mode by design, and no approval before each tool call, so its own security docs point you to a container or a VM.
better: Tab autocomplete as you type, which Claude Code does not have at all, plus an agent, a CLI and cloud agents. Claude Code also runs inside it as an extension.
you give up: Since 12 October it is sold as The X Subscription: the $8 Plus plan runs Grok only, and from the $30 Premium plan up Claude is billed on top at API list price. OpenAI has said its models leave on 12 November.
better: AWS's editor, built on Code OSS, so VS Code settings and Open VSX extensions come along. It drafts requirements, a design and tasks before code, has a CLI, and Pro is $20 for 1,000 credits including Claude Sonnet 5 and Opus 5.
you give up: Credits, not a flat plan: extras are $0.04 each. Opus 5 is a version behind the Opus 5.5 that Claude Code runs, and the spec step is overhead on a two-line fix.
better: $0 for an editor with unlimited Tab, an agent, and the CLI that replaced Gemini CLI for free users. The free plan still runs Claude Sonnet 4.6 and Opus 4.6.
you give up: Both leave the free plan on 2 November 2026, the 5.5 models need a paid, non-trial Google AI Pro plan, and the weekly quota has no published number.
better: Windsurf, renamed on 2 June. Free has unlimited Tab and inline edits plus a light agent quota, and the $20 Pro plan includes OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and SpaceXAI models in its quota.
you give up: Pro's quota refreshes daily and weekly with no number published, so you swap one opaque meter for another. Older tutorials still say Windsurf and Cascade, the agent Devin Local replaced.
Anthropic publishes no number for any plan. Every plan resets on a rolling five-hour session, paid plans add a weekly limit, and Max is defined only as 5x or 20x Pro per session. Claude chat and the desktop app draw from the same allowance, so a long chat in claude.ai shortens your coding day.
The meter also moves. Anthropic doubled the five-hour limits on 6 May, ran a 50% weekly boost until 13 September, and has since set weekly limits 25% above where they were before it. Past the limit you wait, or pay usage credits at API rates.
Many pages ranking for this still sell Gemini CLI on its free tier. That ended on 18 June 2026, when Google replaced it with Antigravity CLI for unpaid and Google One users. Gemini CLI is still Apache licensed and still runs on paid Gemini API keys and Google Cloud.
Antigravity's free plan covers its CLI and editor under a weekly quota Google does not quantify. Against Claude Code that is a real free tier. You lose free Claude on 2 November, and Google's meter is no clearer than Anthropic's.
You can keep the Claude Code app and swap the model behind it. Ollama documents a one-line ollama launch claude and asks for a 64k context window or more, and Z.ai documents the same base-URL swap for its GLM plan. Your CLAUDE.md, skills and hooks keep working.
The catch is support. Anthropic does not support routing Claude Code to non-Claude models, and features each release adds can fail on a model never tuned for them. On Ollama's cloud, web search and some tool controls are not fully supported.
Claude Code is not open source: the GitHub repository is public, but its licence reserves all rights. OpenCode and Pi are MIT, Cline and OpenAI's Codex CLI are Apache 2.0, and Kilo Code, the MIT fork that published the way out when Roo Code archived itself, runs in VS Code, JetBrains and a CLI.
Open source buys a readable agent and a choice of model, not a free one: unless you run it locally, somebody's API still bills per token. Check the last release too. Aider, once the default answer here, has not shipped one since February.
On allowance, the developers who switch mostly say yes, and OpenAI at least prints an estimate for its $20 plan. On a hard, multi-step change, Claude Code still gets more credit for planning.
For a big feature you want planned before code, it can be, since Kiro drafts requirements, a design and tasks first. For quick fixes that step is overhead, and the free plan's 50 credits will not tell you much.
Not really. OpenClaw is a free, MIT licensed personal assistant you message through WhatsApp, Telegram, Slack and other chat apps, and coding is one job among many. Its docs can reuse your Claude Code login through the installed claude program, on the same plan limits, but recommend an API key for anything shared.
Yes. Antigravity's free plan has an agent, a CLI and Claude 4.6 models until 2 November, Copilot Free includes the CLI and agent mode, and Devin Desktop Free has unlimited Tab. OpenCode, Cline and Pi are free software, so with a local model the whole stack costs nothing.
No. Claude's Free plan does not include it; it starts with Pro at $20 a month ($17 billed annually), or an API key billed per token. The full answer →