Claude Code is really good. If you have been using it, you already know that. But the one complaint that keeps coming up, every single time, is the cost. While there is a free way to use Claude Code, the Sonnet and Opus models are what people mainly pay for.
Claude Code sits behind Claude’s Pro or Max plan, and at $20 a month, that is a real ask for a tool you might not be using every single day. There is a better way, and it has been sitting right there the whole time.
I replaced Cursor with a free IDE that does everything Cursor does
Cursor has a worthy free rival—and it’s surprisingly good.
OpenCode is what Claude Code could have been
Free and open-source
OpenCode is an open-source AI coding agent built for the terminal that does almost everything Claude Code does (file reading, editing, running commands, managing context across your whole project), but it is not locked to one model or one subscription. The tool itself is completely free. You bring your own API key, pick your model, and get to work.
It is built in Go, which means the startup is fast, and the binary is tiny. The terminal UI is built with Bubble Tea, and it is one of the few terminal apps I have used that actually feels like someone cared about the design. It does not feel like an afterthought (it even has mouse support!).
The architecture is split into two modes, which I think is a pretty smart design. Plan mode is read-only. The agent looks at your code, figures out what needs to happen, and asks before doing anything. Build mode is where it actually makes changes. I have gotten into the habit of always starting in Plan mode first, especially on anything I care about. It has saved me more than once.
You might be wondering how OpenCode is any better, if Claude Code also does most of these things? The main reasons are usage and token limits. You can subscribe to OpenCode Go, which is the team’s low-cost subscription plan. It is $5 for your first month, then $10 a month after that, and it gives you access to a curated set of open coding models: DeepSeek V4 Pro, MiniMax M2.7, Qwen 3.5, and more. All from a zero-data-retention infrastructure hosted across the US, EU, and Singapore.
The OpenCode Go subscription actually seems like a direct response to Anthropic trying to block third-party harnesses from accessing its models, especially since both launched around the same time early this year. That makes it even more impressive to see an open-source project develop its own workaround so quickly.
It does everything you need it to, and then a bit more
Vibe Coding shouldn’t be expensive
What makes OpenCode feel different from just pointing an API key at a terminal is its LSP integration. It connects to Language Server Protocol servers for the language you are working in, so the agent gets the same error-checking and diagnostics feedback your editor would. It is not just guessing. It is seeing the same linting output you would see. For anything beyond simple scripts, this makes a real difference.
Multi-session support is the other one I keep coming back to. You can have separate sessions running for separate tasks, or even separate projects. I typically have one session open for the feature I am actually building and another one I use for exploratory questions about the codebase. They stay separate, which is a small thing that turns out to matter a lot in practice.
MCP support is there too, so if you have servers set up already (like a GitHub MCP server or anything else), OpenCode can use those tools the same way Claude Code would. The one caveat the team themselves give is that some MCP servers, particularly the GitHub one, tend to bloat context quickly. Worth keeping in mind.
I’ve vibe coded 7 working apps — I wish I knew these 3 things when I started
As I’ve vibe coded and re-coded 7 working projects over the past 3 months, there’s three golden rules that I’ve developed.
For models, what I use day-to-day through the Go plan is MiniMax M2.7 for most things, and GLM-5 when I need something that can actually reason through a harder problem. MiniMax sits at 75.80% on SWE-bench Verified, which puts it within a single point of Claude Opus 4.5’s 76.80%. These are not toy models. For TypeScript and Python work, especially, MiniMax has been shockingly solid for the price.
If you do not want a subscription and would rather bring your own API key, the provider’s support is very extensive. You can point it at Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, DeepSeek, or a local AI server running Ollama. You can even use Nvidia Build for free to experiment with open-weight models. I have mine set up so Ollama handles the trivial stuff, and I drop in an actual API key when I need something serious.
Claude still has its place
Open weight models only get you so far
There is a ceiling, and it is worth being clear about where it sits. For multi-file refactoring, subtle architectural decisions, or anything that requires really holding a lot of context together across a complex codebase, the open models in Go still fall short of Sonnet or Opus in ways you will notice. Not on benchmarks. The numbers are close. But in practice, on tasks that require deep reasoning, Claude still handles them better.
My current setup is OpenCode with Go for the routine 80%: writing functions, building out features from a spec, generating tests, fixing the obvious stuff. And then Claude, when I hit something that actually requires the best model available. The two together cost me less than Claude Pro on its own used to, and I am getting more out of it.
If you are already paying for Claude Code and barely using it, try OpenCode first. If you are not subscribed to anything yet, start with OpenCode and a free API. See how far it gets you and only add a proper Claude subscription when you actually need one. That is the real advice.
Anthropic just doubled limits for Claude plans, and it could transform how you work
Perfect for anyone who uses Claude at work.
Make the switch (where you can)
I have used OpenCode for a handful of real projects now. A personal finance dashboard that pulls data from a few different sources and spits it into a clean local web view. A script that watches a folder and auto-sorts files based on rules I wrote once and have not touched since.
None of these are enormous projects, but they are exactly the kind of thing where Claude Code would have chewed through subscription tokens pretty quickly. With OpenCode and the Go plan, I built all three for well under what a single month of Claude Pro would cost.
