Free AI coding agents with no API key: what each one actually gives you

GitHub Copilot Free, Cursor's Hobby plan, FreeBuff, Clixad, Amp Free, and the Gemini CLI free tier are the only AI coding agents that include model access without an API key, but only Clixad's credit system converts directly into finished work, according to a blog post by an unnamed author. The post notes that GitHub Copilot Free grants 2,000 code completions and 50 chat requests per month, which is only partly convertible, while Cursor publishes no numeric quota and FreeBuff's session-hours do not divide into tokens.

Free AI coding agents with no API key: what each one actually gives you "Free AI coding agent" is used for two different things. Most of the tools on the published lists — Cline, Aider, OpenCode, Continue — are free to install and then ask you for an API key, which means the model bill arrives from a provider instead of from them. That is a fine arrangement and it is not free. The tools that actually include model access with no key and no card are a much shorter list: GitHub Copilot Free, Cursor on the Hobby plan, FreeBuff, and Clixad , with Amp Free and the Gemini CLI free tier alongside them in reduced form. This post is what each of those grants, and which of those grants can be turned into finished work. Four of six cannot, and one vendor no longer publishes a number at all. Two different things called free Search for a free AI coding agent and you get a list with Cline, Aider, OpenCode and Continue near the top. All four are genuinely free software, all four are good, and none of them answers the question that was asked. They are clients. You point them at an API key you obtained and paid for, and the model bill arrives from OpenAI or Anthropic or Google. The tool is free; the coding is not. There is a second category, much smaller, where inference is included: the vendor is paying the model bill, or an advertiser is. Only that category can answer "I want to use an AI coding agent and I do not want to pay for tokens." The filter worth applying to any list: after installing this, do I need to obtain model access from somebody else? If yes, the tool is free and the work is not. Almost every "$0 forever" listicle mixes the two categories, which is why they all look longer than the real set of options. 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 sources-title . | Tool | Who pays for the model | What the free tier grants | |---|---|---| | GitHub Copilot Free | GitHub | 2,000 code completions and 50 chat requests per month; no credit card required | | Cursor Hobby | Cursor | "Limited" agent requests and tab completions; no numeric quota published | | FreeBuff | Advertisers, via text ads between agent turns | Six one-hour sessions per day in limited mode, DeepSeek V4 Flash; a wider picker in supported regions | | Amp Free | Sourcegraph | A free daily allowance, reported in May 2026 as being paused or reduced for more users | | Gemini CLI free tier | Flash models only since March 2026; Pro moved behind a paid subscription | | | Clixad | Advertisers, via a rewarded offerwall in a browser tab | 5,000 credits on signup, and up to 500,000 credits a day earned on completion | Which grants convert into work Now the part the lists skip. 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 /blog/free-ai-coding-tier-limits/ : one ordinary agent task is about a dozen model calls, because the agent resends the whole conversation every round. | Tool | Unit granted | Converts? | |---|---|---| | GitHub Copilot Free | Completions + chat requests / month | Partly — the 50 chat requests are about four agent tasks; the completions do no agent work | | Cursor Hobby | Unpublished | No — there is no number to convert | | FreeBuff | Session-hours per day | No — time does not divide into tokens | | Amp Free | A daily allowance, being reduced | No — the figure is not stable enough to price | | Gemini CLI free tier | Requests per day, Flash only | No — the published quota has moved during 2026 | | Clixad | Credits, metered on real tokens | Yes — directly, on any model | I would rather that table had more "yes" in it, including for reasons of self-interest: a post where the only convertible unit is the author's own looks like a rigged demonstration. It is not rigged, it is the reason this blog keeps returning to the subject. 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 deserves singling out, because its 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. That number is not on the page any more, and repeating it here to fill a table cell would be exactly the drift this site tests against. So the row says "unpublished", which is both the accurate answer and a finding in its own right: a free tier is a set of defaults somebody else controls /blog/free-ai-coding-tier-privacy/ , and a default nobody publishes is one that 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. The assumption for a code completion is stated rather than hidden: 1,200 input tokens of surrounding code and 40 tokens back, the same shape an earlier post /blog/free-ai-coding-tier-privacy/ declared in its markup, read back here rather than retyped. | Grant | On the cheapest model | On a mid coding model | |---|---|---| | Copilot Free: 2,000 completions / month | 24,000 credits | 312,000 credits | | Copilot Free: 50 chat requests / month | about four agent tasks, on any model | | | Clixad: 5,000 credits on signup | 1 task | 0 tasks | | Clixad: 500,000 credits a day, earned | 163 tasks | 11 tasks | Two things in that table are worth not glossing. 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 exactly why they are the generous part of a free tier and the chat requests are not. And Clixad's signup bonus is one task on the cheapest model and none on a mid one. It exists so the first thing you meet is the tool rather than the offerwall, and it is deliberately not enough to lean on. The daily figure is what the product actually runs on, and it arrives on completion : most survey attempts end in a screenout that credits nothing, which is normal across the offerwall industry rather than a fault in our integration. Anyone comparing that 500,000 against Copilot's monthly grant should weigh it against the attempts that pay nothing, not just 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 /blog/freebuff-vs-clixad/ covers that trade in detail. If you want frontier models on a free tier, or an allowance you can actually count: Clixad. Credits meter against real usage, every model is on the same funding with no locked tier, 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. FAQ What is the best free AI coding agent that does not need an API key? There are four in wide use that include model access rather than asking you to supply a key: GitHub Copilot Free, Cursor on the Hobby plan, FreeBuff, and Clixad. Amp Free and the Gemini CLI free tier also include inference but have both been reduced during 2026. Which is best depends on the shape of your work rather than on a ranking, because the four grant incompatible units: Copilot Free grants completions and chat requests per month, Cursor publishes no numeric quota at all, FreeBuff grants six one-hour sessions per day in limited mode, and Clixad grants credits metered against real token usage. Are Cline, Aider and OpenCode free? They are free to install and they are not free to run. Each is an open-source client that you point at your own API key, so the model bill arrives from OpenAI, Anthropic or Google instead of from the tool's author. That is a good arrangement if you already hold a key and want no subscription on top, and it is not an answer to the question 'how do I use an AI coding agent without paying'. Most published lists of free coding agents mix these in with tools that include inference, which is the single most common way those lists mislead. How much work does a free AI coding tier actually finish? Usually less than the headline number suggests, and often the question cannot be answered from the published figure at all. One ordinary agent task is around a dozen model calls, because the agent resends the whole conversation each round. So Copilot Free's 50 chat requests a month is about four such tasks, and its 2,000 monthly code completions do no agent work at all: priced on our engine at an assumed 1,200 input and 40 output tokens each, a month of them is 24,000 credits of inference on the cheapest catalogued model. Cursor's Hobby plan cannot be converted at all, because it no longer publishes a number. Is there a free AI coding agent with no credit card required? Yes, several. GitHub Copilot Free states no credit card is required, FreeBuff's launch post says "No account. No credit card. No config file.", and Clixad asks for a GitHub sign-in and nothing else. The credit card question and the API key question are different, though: a tool can be free of a card and still expect you to bring model access. Check whether inference is included before you check whether payment details are requested. Why do free coding tiers keep shrinking? Because inference costs the vendor real money per user, unlike a traditional software free tier which costs almost nothing per additional account. That makes a free allowance a marketing line item rather than a product feature, and line items get cut. Three moved during 2026 alone: Google restricted the Gemini CLI free tier to Flash models in March, Amp reported pausing or reducing its free daily allowance for more users in May, and Cursor stopped publishing a Hobby quota. None of those required your agreement, because a default is not a contract term you negotiated. Sources - GitHub, Copilot plans and pricing https://github.com/features/copilot/plans , for the Free plan's 2,000 completions and 50 chat requests per month and its statement that no credit card is required. Read 12 August 2026. - Freebuff, Introducing Freebuff: the free coding agent https://freebuff.com/blog/freebuff-launch , for the limited-mode allowance "Deepseek v4 Flash only, 6 one-hour sessions per day" , the regional split, the description of the ads, and "No account. No credit card. No config file." Read 12 August 2026. - Google, Service update: mitigating abuse and prioritizing traffic https://github.com/google-gemini/gemini-cli/discussions/22970 , Gemini CLI discussion 22970, effective 25 March 2026, for the restriction of the free tier to Flash models. - Sourcegraph, Amp Free Is Ad-Free https://ampcode.com/news/amp-free-is-ad-free , for the 23 May 2026 note on pausing or reducing the free daily allowance for more users. - Cursor's Hobby plan: the absence of a published numeric quota is a statement about the current pricing page rather than a figure taken from it. Checked 12 August 2026. - 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 completion shape 1,200 input, 40 output and the twelve-call task shape are read from the markup of the two earlier posts that declared them, so the figures cannot drift apart. - Offerwall payouts: amounts observed on Clixad's own CPX wall in Germany, credited on completion, July 2026.