Which free AI coding agents include the model? Six compared

Two different things called free

Cline, Aider, OpenCode and Continue are good free software, but they are clients: you point them at an API key you paid for, and the model bill arrives from OpenAI, Anthropic or Google.

In a second, much smaller category, inference is included: the vendor pays the model bill, or an advertiser does.

The shortlist that includes inference

These are the tools in wide use in August 2026 that give you model access without a key of your own. Figures are from each vendor's own pages, linked in Sources.

Which grants convert into work

A grant is only useful if you can work out what it finishes, and these six are denominated in five incompatible units. The obstacle is that a request is not a unit of work: one ordinary agent task is about a dozen model calls, because the agent resends the whole conversation every round.

We would rather that table had more "yes" in it: a post where the only convertible unit is our own looks like a rigged demonstration. A vendor that meters tokens can tell you what your allowance buys. A vendor that grants requests, sessions or an unnamed "limited" amount cannot, even if it wants to.

One vendor stopped publishing its number

Cursor's Hobby plan used to carry a stated quota and no longer does. The current pricing page describes limited agent requests and limited tab completions without a figure, and the limit is account-specific and visible only in the dashboard after you sign up.

Articles still quote "2,000 completions and 50 requests" for Cursor, but that number is no longer on the page, so the row says "unpublished". That is a finding in itself: a free tier is a set of defaults somebody else controls, and a default nobody publishes can move without anyone noticing.

What the convertible ones are worth

Two of the six can be priced. Copilot Free publishes both of its numbers, so its allowance can be converted into inference at list rates through our own metering engine. A code completion is assumed to be 1,200 input tokens of surrounding code and 40 tokens back, the shape an earlier post declared in its markup.

Copilot Free's headline allowance, the 2,000 completions, is 24,000 credits of inference on the cheapest model in our catalogue, about a quarter of a dollar at list rates. Inline completions are cheap to serve, which is why they are the generous part of a free tier and the chat requests are not.

Clixad's signup bonus is eight tasks on the cheapest model and none on a mid one: the same grant buys a week of work or nothing, depending on the row you spend it on. The daily figure arrives on completion, and most survey attempts end in a screenout that credits nothing, which is normal on every offerwall. Weigh that 500,000 against the attempts that pay nothing as well as the ones that pay.

How to pick

If you write mostly inline, in an editor: Copilot Free. Its generous half is exactly the half you would use, and completions are the cheapest thing any of these vendors serves.

If you want an agent and want to start this minute: FreeBuff. No account, no card, no earning step. Its ads sit between agent turns, and its launch post states that prompts and messages may be analyzed to personalise them. The comparison post covers that trade in detail.

If you want frontier models without a subscription, or an allowance you can actually count: Clixad. Credits meter against real usage, the frontier models run on credits you earn by completing an offer, and an unused hour costs nothing. The price is the offerwall: a browser tab, and attempts that often pay nothing.

If you already hold an API key: Cline or Aider, and none of this applies to you. Your marginal cost is the token bill you were already paying, and no included-inference tier will beat holding the key yourself for predictability.

If none of the six suits you, a later post prices five routes to coding without paying at all, including a local open-weight model and a trial balance. Two later posts read these numbers more closely: what Gemini CLI's daily request quota buys, and when each of these tiers resets and what carries over.

If what you want is a free substitute for a paid agent, the comparison posts run our numbers against one tool at a time: Claude Code and the Codex CLI on subscriptions, and FreeBuff, whose free allowance changed in September.

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