clixadFreeBuff alternative: what FreeBuff grants now, and who should switch
FreeBuff costs nothing in money. Text ads pay for its models, and its README says "We may analyze prompts and messages to personalize ads." Since our comparison in August, its free allowance has become a daily amount of Freebucks, which buy one-hour model sessions and depend on where you are: from 100 a day in the US down to 25 outside FreeBuff's full-access countries or on any VPN.
Clixad meters tokens in credits and gives every account the same free allowance on five cheap models. The rest is funded by an action you complete in a browser tab. We build Clixad, so weigh the sourced numbers above our verdict. The verdict includes this: if FreeBuff's models do your work and you code a lot, stay with FreeBuff.
What FreeBuff costs
In money, nothing. FreeBuff's CLI page says "No API key, no credit card. It just runs.", and its README says "Text ads support access to the included models." Everything in this section is quoted from FreeBuff's own site and README, read on 18 September 2026.
The allowance is a daily currency. From FreeBuff's FAQ: "Where your app shows a Freebucks balance, Freebucks buy one-hour model sessions." How many you get depends on your country:
| Where you are | Freebucks a day |
|---|---|
| US | 100 |
| CA, GB, AU, NZ, IE, NO, SE, DK, FI, NL, AT, LU, IS | 70 |
| DE, FR, ES, IT, PT, BE, CH, LI, MT, KR | 40 |
| Everywhere else, and any VPN | 25 |
The homepage turns the US figure into hours: "100 Freebucks every day. Spend them on any mix of these models." On that allowance a whole day on GLM 5.3 Flash is 20 hours and a whole day on GPT-5.6 Luna is 5, and FreeBuff adds that "Hour totals use your whole daily allowance on one model; they aren't added together." Daily Freebucks do not pile up: "Daily Freebucks refill at midnight in your reset timezone and unused daily Freebucks do not carry over." Freebucks earned from referrals and bounties behave differently, and FreeBuff says "Earned Freebucks stay until spent."
The other price is paid in attention and data. The ads are short text between agent turns, and FreeBuff's README is plain about what may inform them: "We may analyze prompts and messages to personalize ads." It draws a line in the other direction as well: "We do not give separately uploaded files or connected repositories to advertising providers." On training, the README says data is used "Only when a model or feature says data may be used for AI training.", and the FAQ puts that label on two models in the picker, DeepSeek V4.1 Flash and Muse Spark 1.2.
FreeBuff now sells subscriptions as well. Its FAQ lists three tiers for limited access, from 105 Freebucks a day on Starter up to 350 on Pro, each with a monthly bonus. The prices are on a plans page that asks you to sign in first, so we do not quote them.
What changed since August
Our FreeBuff vs Clixad comparison, written on 12 August, quoted the launch post's limited mode: "Deepseek v4 Flash only, 6 one-hour sessions per day." The launch post still says that. FreeBuff's FAQ now describes two systems side by side, and which one applies depends on what your app shows. Where it shows a balance, you are on Freebucks. For the other case the FAQ says: "Where your app shows session allowances instead, limited mode includes GLM 5.3 Flash and DeepSeek V4.1 Flash and MiMo 2.5 and Solar Pro 4, with 6 one-hour sessions per day."
The README calls that second arrangement "the legacy session system", and it lists several models as "unmetered at full access". We read this as a move from a fixed count of sessions to a priced daily currency, with the older system still running for some accounts. FreeBuff says the answer depends on your app, so check there.
The ads have not moved, and neither has the sentence about prompts and messages. That part of the August post still holds, and it explains in detail why the two products choose their ads so differently.
What Clixad does differently
Tokens are the unit. FreeBuff prices time: a session is an hour whatever happens in it. We meter every model call from its real token count, at 100,000 credits to one US dollar of list value. An hour spent reading a diff costs next to nothing on Clixad, and an hour of dense agent work costs what its tokens cost.
The free allowance is the same in every country. Five cheap models are free up to 12,000 credits of usage a day for every account: GPT-5 Nano, Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite, DeepSeek V4 Flash, Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite and Kimi K2. That allowance sits inside a daily budget shared by everybody, so on a busy day the free turns can run out sooner, and a new account gets 25,000 credits wherever it signs up. The offerwall is the part that varies. Surveys are targeted by country, so what the wall offers differs from one place to the next.
What carries over is much the same. Credits you earn or buy do not expire. Our daily free allowance resets at 00:00 UTC and does not carry over, which is the rule FreeBuff applies to its daily Freebucks, and FreeBuff's earned Freebucks keep just as our credits do.
Frontier models sit on the same balance. Claude Opus 5 and GPT-5.5 are in our catalogue next to the cheap models, with no locked tier; a stronger model simply costs more credits per task. FreeBuff's desktop app can run Claude Code and Codex, and its README says it does so "using your existing provider account".
Nothing you type chooses our ad. Clixad shows one sponsored line marked
Ad above the input box while a model call runs. It is selected on one fixed category set
by our server, and the request carries no field a prompt could travel in.
CLIXAD_SPONSOR=0 stops the request being made at all. The money that pays for the
models comes from the offerwall, where an advertiser pays for a completed action in a separate tab.
Earning takes effort, and often fails. Credits arrive on completion. The most common outcome of starting a survey is a screenout: a few questions in, the survey decides you are not the respondent it wants and ends with nothing credited, or with a small bonus. From our own ledger, completed offers on our CPX wall have credited from 9,000 to 114,000 credits on completion, with a median of 51,000: 26 completions recorded in our ledger between 27 July 2026 and 12 September 2026, as of 14 September 2026. The ledger does not record how long an offer took, so we cannot tell you what a minute pays.
One agent task, priced
FreeBuff grants hours and we grant tokens, and there is no exchange rate between the two. Inventing one would be the error our post on request counts exists to name. What we can show is our own side, on the workload this blog prices throughout: a single instruction that an agent turns into twelve model calls, starting at 12,000 input tokens and resending the whole conversation every round. A test recomputes every figure below from our pricing engine.
| Model | Credits per task | Free allowance, per day | Earning cap, per day |
|---|---|---|---|
| GPT-5 Nano | 3,051 | 3 | 163 |
| DeepSeek V4 Flash | 7,629 | 1 | 65 |
| Claude Opus 5 | 288,450 | not a free model | 1 |
| GPT-5.5 | 293,850 | not a free model | 1 |
DeepSeek V4 Flash is the model FreeBuff's launch post named for limited mode, and FreeBuff now serves its successor, V4.1 Flash. Our free allowance covers 1 whole task on it a day, and a full day at the earning cap covers 65. On FreeBuff an hour holds however many tasks you and the agent get through in it, which is why the two cannot be ranked.
The two frontier rows are the ones FreeBuff's free picker has no counterpart for. A full day at our cap covers 1 task on either, and the 25,000-credit signup bonus covers none. That is little, and it needs no provider account of your own.
Who Clixad fits
Someone who wants Claude or GPT frontier models without a subscription. The price is a lot of earning per task, as the table shows, with no monthly bill and no provider account of your own.
Someone who would prefer that nothing they type chooses an ad. FreeBuff says prompts and messages may be analyzed for that. Our ad line is chosen without them, and it can be switched off.
Someone whose sessions are mostly reading and thinking. An hour with the agent called now and then uses up a whole FreeBuff session, and on a token meter it costs very little.
Who should stay with FreeBuff
Anyone who codes a lot on FreeBuff's models. A clock is kind to heavy inference: an hour of the agent working flat out costs one hour, where our meter charges every token. For a full day of dense agent work, FreeBuff's allowance gives more at no cost than ours does, and we would tell anyone in that position to stay.
Anyone who wants no friction at all. FreeBuff's CLI page says "No accounts to create, no keys to paste.", and there is no earning step. Clixad asks for a GitHub login, and past the free allowance it asks you to go and complete an offer. FreeBuff also ships a desktop app for parallel agents and a hosted web app builder, and Clixad is a terminal agent only.
Anyone who codes all day on frontier models should pay. For that reader a paid plan beats both of us. The Claude Code comparison and the Codex comparison run our numbers against those subscriptions, and for full-time use the subscription wins both times.
FAQ
Is FreeBuff really free?
In money, yes. FreeBuff's CLI needs no API key and no credit card, and text ads pay for the included models. The free allowance is a daily amount of Freebucks that buy one-hour model sessions, from 100 a day in the US down to 25 outside the full-access countries or on any VPN, and unused daily Freebucks do not carry over. FreeBuff also sells subscriptions that raise the daily amount; their prices sit behind a sign-in, so we do not quote them.
Does FreeBuff use my prompts for ads?
FreeBuff's README says: "We may analyze prompts and messages to personalize ads." It also says: "We do not give separately uploaded files or connected repositories to advertising providers." So prompts and messages are in scope for ad personalisation by FreeBuff's own description, and uploads and connected repositories are not handed to ad providers. Clixad's one ad line is chosen on a fixed category set by our server, and nothing you type takes part in choosing it.
How do Freebucks compare with Clixad credits?
They measure different things and do not convert. A Freebuck buys time: FreeBuff says Freebucks buy one-hour model sessions, and an hour costs the same whether the agent works hard or waits. A Clixad credit buys tokens, at 100,000 credits to one US dollar of list value, so a quiet hour costs almost nothing and a busy one costs what its tokens cost. Daily Freebucks do not carry over, and neither does our daily free allowance. Freebucks earned from referrals or bounties keep, and so do Clixad credits, which do not expire.
Who should switch from FreeBuff to Clixad?
Someone who wants Claude Opus 5 or GPT-5.5 without a subscription or a provider account, or someone who would prefer that nothing they type takes part in choosing an ad. Anyone doing a full day of dense agent work on FreeBuff's models should stay, since a clock gives more at no cost for that kind of day than our meter does. Anyone doing a full day on frontier models is better served by a paid Claude Code or Codex plan than by either of us.
Sources
- Freebuff, freebuff.com, for "100 Freebucks every day. Spend them on any mix of these models.", the per-model hours on that allowance, and "Hour totals use your whole daily allowance on one model; they aren't added together." Read 18 September 2026.
- Freebuff, Freebuff CLI, for "No API key, no credit card. It just runs.", "No accounts to create, no keys to paste." and for the FAQ answers quoted here: Freebucks buying one-hour model sessions, the daily amount by country, the refill and carry-over rules, "Earned Freebucks stay until spent.", the limited-access subscription tiers, the session-allowance wording of limited mode, and the AI-training label on DeepSeek V4.1 Flash and Muse Spark 1.2. The plans page,
freebuff.com/plans, redirected to a sign-in page when checked. Read 18 September 2026. - CodebuffAI, freebuff on GitHub, for "Text ads support access to the included models.", "We may analyze prompts and messages to personalize ads.", "We do not give separately uploaded files or connected repositories to advertising providers.", "Only when a model or feature says data may be used for AI training.", "the legacy session system", "unmetered at full access" and the desktop app running Claude Code and Codex "using your existing provider account". Read 18 September 2026.
- Freebuff, Introducing Freebuff: the free coding agent, published 12 February 2026 and updated 22 July 2026, for "Deepseek v4 Flash only, 6 one-hour sessions per day" and the ads appearing between agent turns. Read 18 September 2026.
- Per-task credit figures: Clixad's own pricing engine,
packages/pricing, over the model catalogue read from OpenRouter on 26 July 2026, recomputed by the test beside this post. The twelve-call task shape is read from the#sessiontable of the tier-limits post so the two pages cannot drift. - Credit rate, signup bonus, earning cap and free allowance:
packages/pricing(creditUsd,signupBonusCredits,maxAdRewardUsdPerDay,freeTierDailyCreditsPerUser,FREE_MODEL_IDS). That credits do not expire: section 6 of our terms. - Offer payouts: completed CPX offers as recorded in Clixad's own ledger, credited between 27 July 2026 and 12 September 2026 and read on 14 September 2026, held as
CPX_COMPLETIONSinpackages/pricing.