benchr
Here's the pleasant surprise. You can write code with an AI assistant today and pay nothing, and the experience is good. Autocomplete that keeps up with you, a chat panel that knows your repo, an agent that edits files on its own. None of that costs a cent on day one.
Then you hit the wall. Maybe it's the fiftieth agent request of the month, or a trial that quietly expires, or a credit pool that empties on a Tuesday afternoon. The free tier didn't lie to you. It just has an edge, and most people walk off it without noticing until the upgrade prompt shows up. This page is about exactly where that edge sits for each tool.
There are two kinds of free here, and they fail in totally different ways, so it's worth splitting them up front.
Freemium: free until the cap
This is the group most people mean by "free AI coding": a polished product with a no-cost tier and a paid one above it. The tool is free, the model is free, and the catch is the cap. You get a monthly allowance of completions and agent requests, and when it runs out you either wait for the reset, fall back to a weaker model, or pay.
GitHub Copilot Free is the one that put this on the map. It launched December 18, 2024, and turned Copilot from a paid-only product into something anyone with a GitHub account could try. The allowance is 2,000 code completions and 50 agent-or-chat requests a month, no credit card required. The 2,000 completions sound generous and basically are. The 50 agent requests are the real ceiling, because agent runs get metered as premium requests and a few sessions of letting it loose on your codebase can burn through them fast.
Cursor plays a different game. Its free tier, called Hobby, also skips the credit card, but the honest thing to say is that Cursor stopped publishing a hard free number. The official pricing page now just lists "Limited Agent requests" and "Limited Tab completions," plus a Pro trial. Older write-ups quoting a fixed "2,000 completions, 50 slow requests" describe Cursor's setup before its June 2025 switch to usage-based billing, so treat those figures as outdated, not current. What you really get is the full Pro experience for the trial, then a deliberate drop to a throttled free tier. That drop is the upgrade nudge.
Windsurf, formerly Codeium, has the cleanest concrete number in this whole roundup. Its free plan gives you 25 prompt credits a month, plus a two-week Pro trial. The nuance that matters: basic Fast Tab autocomplete is free and unlimited and doesn't touch your credits, so you're never fully locked out. But every premium agentic message in Cascade spends one of your 25 credits, and those credits don't roll over. So Windsurf is the tool that always works a little, and runs out of its smart mode quickly.
Then there's the generous one — or was. Gemini Code Assist for individuals launched free with a personal Google account and no credit card in March 2025 with up to 6,000 code completions and 240 chat requests per day. Google's official quotas page as of May 2026 caps agent and CLI use at 1,000 model requests per user per day. Either way, that's a different universe from Copilot Free's 2,000 completions a month.
Put the freemium tiers side by side and the picture gets clear quickly. Here's what each one gives you for nothing, and the moment it starts costing.
| Tool | What's free | Where it starts costing |
|---|---|---|
| Gemini Code Assist (individuals) | Up to 6,000 completions + 240 chat/day at launch; 1,000 model requests/user/day on the current quotas page | Past the daily quota, or stepping up to paid Standard/Enterprise tiers |
| GitHub Copilot Free | 2,000 completions + 50 agent/chat requests per month, no card | The 50 agent/chat requests run out fast; Pro adds more |
| Windsurf Free | Unlimited Fast Tab autocomplete + 25 prompt credits/month + 2-week Pro trial | Each premium Cascade message spends a credit; credits don't roll over |
| Cursor Hobby | Limited Agent requests + limited Tab completions, no card; Pro trial included | After the trial you drop to a throttled free tier; Pro is usage-billed |
Bring your own key: free editor, rented brain
The second flavor of free is the one that confuses people. Cline, Continue.dev, Roo Code, and Zed are all free to install. Cline, Continue.dev, and Roo Code are open source under Apache 2.0, and Roo Code is a fork of Cline, so they feel like siblings. Zed's AI agent works with no Zed subscription at all. None of them charge you for the editor.
What they don't include is the model. Each one runs on an API key you supply: Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, OpenRouter, and others, with Zed storing your key in the OS secure credential storage. So the tool is free and the brain is metered. You're paying the model provider directly, per token, and that's a real bill that grows with usage. There's no cap to hit because there's no allowance, only your card.
The only genuine zero in this group is local. Cline, Continue.dev, Roo Code, and Zed can all point at a model running on your own machine through Ollama. Now nobody's billing you. The trade is that you're spending your own hardware and electricity, and a local model is weaker than a frontier one. If you're curious how far the open-weight options have actually come, the open-weight tier right now goes deeper on what local models can and can't do for coding today. And if the question is specifically which open-weight model scores highest on coding benchmarks — DeepSeek, Qwen, or Kimi — the best free coding model roundup has the head-to-head.
If you do go the BYO-key route, the thing that decides your bill isn't the editor, it's how much you make the model read and write. Big context and chatty agents add up. Cutting your token bill covers the levers that keep a metered API bill boring instead of scary, which matters a lot more here than on a flat-rate plan.
On a freemium tier you pay when you run out. On a BYO-key editor you pay from the first request. Same word, opposite trap.
So which free one should you pick
Go with Gemini Code Assist through June 17, 2026 if you want the biggest free ceiling and you're fine in Google's tooling — its daily limits dwarf everything else here. After June 18, the free individuals tier ends. Look at Antigravity for the replacement, or move to one of the options below.
Pick Copilot Free if you live in the GitHub ecosystem and mostly want to try agent mode. The 2,000 completions carry normal autocomplete work fine. Just know the 50 agent requests are the part you'll run dry first.
Choose Windsurf's free plan if you want a tool that never fully shuts off. Unlimited Fast Tab means you always have autocomplete, even after your 25 premium credits are gone for the month.
And reach for Cline, Roo Code, Continue.dev, or Zed if you already have an API key or a local model. You skip the caps entirely and pay only for what the model actually does. That's the right call for heavy users who'd blow past a freemium allowance anyway.
One cleanup note on the field: skip Sourcegraph Cody as a free option. Cody Free and Cody Pro were discontinued on July 23, 2025, with new sign-ups ending June 25, 2025, and Sourcegraph now points individual developers to its newer tool, Amp. So it's no longer a free coding pick, whatever older lists say.
If you want to go past the free tier and compare how these assistants actually perform head to head, the coding assistants shootout ranks them on real tasks. And if your free coding tool is just one piece of a wider AI stack, the best AI tools for social media covers the other side of the workflow.
Frequently asked
What is the best free AI coding tool right now?
It depends what you mean by free. For the most generous no-cost limits, Gemini Code Assist for individuals wins: free with a personal Google account, it launched in March 2025 with up to 6,000 code completions and 240 chat requests per day, and Google's current quotas page caps agent and CLI use at 1,000 model requests per user per day. If you'd rather not be capped at all, free editors like Cline, Continue.dev, Roo Code, and Zed cost nothing to install, but you bring your own API key and pay the model provider instead.
Is GitHub Copilot free?
Yes. GitHub Copilot Free launched December 18, 2024, and needs no credit card. GitHub's plans page lists it at 2,000 code completions and 50 agent-or-chat requests per month. The 50 agent and chat requests are the real ceiling, since agent runs are metered as premium requests and can be used up fast. It's great for trying things and tight for heavy day-to-day agent work.
What do free tiers actually limit?
On freemium plans, the limit is the cap. Copilot Free is 2,000 completions and 50 agent or chat requests a month. Windsurf's free plan gives 25 prompt credits a month that don't roll over, though its Fast Tab autocomplete stays free and unlimited. Cursor's Hobby plan no longer publishes a fixed number and just lists limited Agent requests and limited Tab completions. Gemini Code Assist is the most generous of the bunch.
When do API costs start?
Two different moments. On freemium tiers, costs start when you hit the cap or your trial ends: Cursor's Pro trial gives you the full experience for a week or two, then drops you to a throttled free tier. On the bring-your-own-key editors, the meter starts on your very first request, because you're paying the model provider per token from the beginning. The free part is the editor, not the model.
Are bring-your-own-key tools really free?
The tool is, the brain isn't. Cline, Continue.dev, Roo Code, and Zed are free to install, and Cline, Continue, and Roo Code are open source under Apache 2.0. But they run on an API key you supply from Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, or OpenRouter, so you pay that provider per token, and the bill scales with how hard you push the agent. The one true zero is running a local model through Ollama, where you trade money for your own hardware and a weaker model.
Changelog
- May 30, 2026 — Originally published and updated same day. Free-tier limits verified against GitHub, Cursor, Windsurf, and Google's official pages; Cody discontinuation confirmed against Sourcegraph's blog. Added callout and updated recommendation: per Google's official Gemini Code Assist quotas page (developers.google.com/gemini-code-assist/resources/quotas), the free individuals tier and IDE extensions stop serving requests on June 18, 2026, with users directed to Antigravity as replacement.
References
- GitHub, "Announcing GitHub Copilot Free," github.blog, accessed May 2026.
- GitHub, "Copilot plans & pricing," github.com, accessed May 2026.
- Cursor, "Pricing," cursor.com, accessed May 2026.
- Tessl, "Cursor's new pricing structure, explained," tessl.io, accessed May 2026.
- Windsurf, "Plans and usage," docs.windsurf.com, accessed May 2026.
- Windsurf, "Pricing," windsurf.com, accessed May 2026.
- InfoQ, "Google launches free tier for Gemini Code Assist," infoq.com, accessed May 2026.
- Google for Developers, "Gemini Code Assist quotas," developers.google.com, accessed May 2026.
- Sourcegraph, "Changes to Cody Free, Pro, and Enterprise Starter plans," sourcegraph.com, accessed May 2026.
- Cline, "Cline," cline.bot, accessed May 2026.
- Continue.dev, "Model providers overview," docs.continue.dev, accessed May 2026.
- Roo Code, "Roo Code (Visual Studio Marketplace)," marketplace.visualstudio.com, accessed May 2026.
- Zed, "LLM providers," zed.dev, accessed May 2026.