A free Claude Code alternative, with no subscription

Clixad is a coding agent for your terminal that does the job Claude Code does: it reads your project, edits files and runs commands, and it asks before it changes anything. It needs no Anthropic plan and no API key. Five models are free every day, and Claude models run on credits you earn or buy.

No API key
No monthly subscription
Free models every day

npm install -g clixad

Node 20 or newer. Then clixad login signs you in with GitHub, and clixad in a project opens the agent.

$0to install and sign in

25,000credits on signup

24,000credits free every day, on five models

4Claude models on the same balance

Claude Code and Clixad, side by side

Anthropic's side comes from its pricing page and its Claude Code documentation, read on 29 September 2026. Ours comes from the pricing engine that meters every request.

Anthropic's figures from its own pages, read 29 September 2026. Clixad's figures from `packages/pricing`.
	Claude Code	Clixad
Cheapest way in	Pro, $20 a month, or $17 a month billed annually	$0, with a GitHub sign-in
On a free plan	Not included on Anthropic's Free plan	Five models free, up to 24,000 credits of usage a day
How usage is counted	One pool shared with chat, "so there's no fixed message count"	Credits metered on real tokens, 100,000 to one US dollar of list value
Models	Anthropic's Claude models	13 models from five vendors, four of them Claude
Project instructions	`CLAUDE.md`	`AGENTS.md` and `CLIXAD.md`. It does not read CLAUDE.md
MCP servers	A `.mcp.json` at the project root	The same `.mcp.json`, read as it is
Hooks, skills, plugins, agent teams	Yes	No
Advertising	None	A marked ad line while a model call runs, off with `CLIXAD_SPONSOR=0`

What Claude costs on Clixad

Claude models are not in the free allowance. They run on credits, priced per token at the same rate as every other model, so the price of a turn is public before you pick it. The table prices one turn of 20,000 input and 1,500 output tokens, the size the /model picker estimates with.

Credits for one turn on each Claude model, and how many turns the 25,000-credit signup bonus and a full day at the 500,000-credit earning cap each cover. Recomputed from `packages/pricing` by a test.
Model	Credits per turn	Turns on the signup bonus	Turns in a day at the earning cap
Claude Haiku 4.5	4,125	6	121
Claude Sonnet 5.5	8,250	3	60
Claude Opus 5.5	16,500	1	30
Claude Fable 5.1	41,250	0	12

The earning cap is 500,000 credits a day, reached by completing offers in a browser tab. Credits arrive on completion, and a screenout, which ends a survey part way with nothing or a small bonus, is the most common outcome of starting a survey. The smallest pack you can buy instead is $5 for 500,000 credits, the same as a full day at the cap. For one whole agent task priced on every Claude model, read what Claude Code costs, and when to pay for it anyway.

The part that is free

Every account gets 24,000 credits of free usage a day on five cheaper models: GPT-5 Nano, Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite, DeepSeek V4 Flash, Gemini 3.5 Flash-Lite and Kimi K2.5. None of them is a Claude model. A new account starts on DeepSeek V4 Flash, where the allowance is about 49 turns a day. It sits inside a daily budget shared by everybody, so on a busy day the free turns can end sooner, and past either limit the five models cost credits until 00:00 UTC. What each free model gives you.

When Claude Code is the better choice

If you code with Claude all day. Anthropic describes Max as "For people who work with Claude all day", and its cost documentation reports that "the average cost is around $13 per developer per active day" for enterprise developers paying by the token. Our whole daily earning cap is $5 of list value, and credits you buy from us pay for tokens at provider cost with a 1.5 markup on top. A full-time Claude day is cheaper on Anthropic's plans.

If you rely on what Claude Code does beyond editing. Its documentation covers hooks, skills, plugins and agent teams. Clixad has none of them.

If you want no advertising at all. While a model call runs, Clixad can show a line marked Ad in the terminal. Nothing you type takes part in choosing it, and CLIXAD_SPONSOR=0 stops the request for it being made at all. Claude Code shows none.

One limit worth knowing before you try: Claude Code cannot use Clixad as its backend. Anthropic's gateway guide says "A gateway must expose at least one of the following API formats to Claude Code clients", and our gateway speaks only the OpenAI-compatible chat format, which is not one of them. Claude models run inside Clixad's own agent instead.

Moving a project over

npm install -g clixad, then clixad login. The account is created with 25,000 credits in it.
Copy CLAUDE.md to AGENTS.md or CLIXAD.md. Clixad reads those two.
Leave .mcp.json where it is. Clixad reads the mcpServers object Claude Code writes.
Run clixad in the project and pick a model with /model. The free rows say how many turns they have left today.

FAQ

Is Clixad a free Claude Code alternative?

For the agent and the cheap models, yes. Clixad costs nothing to install, needs no API key and no subscription, and five models are free up to 24,000 credits of usage a day. Claude models are not part of that allowance: Claude Sonnet 5.5 costs 8,250 credits for a turn of 20,000 input and 1,500 output tokens, paid from credits you earn or buy.

Can I use Claude Sonnet and Claude Opus in Clixad?

Yes. Claude Haiku 4.5, Claude Sonnet 5.5, Claude Opus 5.5 and Claude Fable 5.1 are all in the catalogue, on the same balance as every other model. The 25,000-credit signup bonus covers 3 turns on Sonnet 5.5 and 1 on Opus 5.5.

Can Claude Code run on Clixad's free models?

No. Claude Code needs a gateway that exposes one of the API formats Anthropic lists for it, starting with its own Messages format, and Clixad's gateway speaks only the OpenAI-compatible chat format. The free models run inside Clixad's own terminal agent.

Does Clixad read CLAUDE.md?

No. It reads project instructions from AGENTS.md and CLIXAD.md, so copy CLAUDE.md across when you switch. MCP servers declared in a project's .mcp.json are read as they are.

Sources

Anthropic, Plans & Pricing, for Pro at $20 a month or $17 a month billed annually, Max from $100 a month, Claude Code among the features of Pro and not of Free, "For people who work with Claude all day" and "so there's no fixed message count". Read 29 September 2026.
Anthropic, Manage costs effectively, for "the average cost is around $13 per developer per active day", and for hooks, skills, plugins and agent teams. Read 29 September 2026.
Anthropic, Claude Code gateway compatibility guide, for "A gateway must expose at least one of the following API formats to Claude Code clients" and the formats it lists. Read 29 September 2026.
Anthropic, Connect Claude Code to tools via MCP, for project-scoped servers in a .mcp.json file. Read 29 September 2026.
Every Clixad figure: packages/pricing (creditsForUsage, signupBonusCredits, freeTierDailyCreditsPerUser, FREE_MODEL_IDS, maxAdRewardUsdPerDay, CREDIT_PACKS), over the model catalogue read from OpenRouter on 27 September 2026, recomputed by the test beside this page. A turn is 20,000 input and 1,500 output tokens, FREE_TURN_USAGE, the size the /model picker estimates with.
Which instruction files and MCP configuration Clixad reads: apps/cli/src/context.ts and apps/cli/src/mcp.ts. The one chat format the gateway serves: apps/gateway/src/server.ts.