A free Claude Code alternative

The short answer

Use OmniRush. It is a terminal agent and a desktop app in one free account: GPT 6 Astra, GPT 6.1 Sol and GPT 6 Sol with a daily allowance that refills every day, no card and no paid tier. Claude Opus 5.5, Claude Sonnet 5.5 and Kimi K3.1 Pro are in the model list too.

Why Claude Code is not free

Anthropic's setup guide says Claude Code “requires a Pro, Max, Team, Enterprise, or Console account” and that “the free claude.ai plan does not include Claude Code access”. Claude's pricing page puts Pro at $17 a month billed yearly ($200 up front) or $20 billed monthly, and Max from $100 a month. A Console account means paying for API usage instead, metered per task.

OmniRush has no paid plan at all. Every account gets an allowance of frontier-model work that refills every day, with no card and nothing to upgrade to.

OmniRush has no paid plan at all.

What you get with OmniRush

• Frontier GPT models for free: GPT 6 Astra, GPT 6.1 Sol and GPT 6 Sol, with a daily allowance that refills every day. No card, no paid tier, no API bill.
• A terminal CLI built on the opencode engine: an interactive agent, one-shot runs with -p, pipes, scripts, CI and SSH.
• A desktop app for Windows, macOS and Linux with swarm agents: ask for a swarm and several agents split one task side by side, then hand you one summary. It also has a code editor and an IDE layout beside the chat.
• A Linux sandbox per project, so the agent's installs and commands run apart from the rest of your machine, and installed packages are still there next time.
• Guarded by default: the agent asks before risky actions such as git writes, destructive commands and sudo. Careful mode asks before every change and command; Auto never asks.
• Built-in best-practice guides for setup, features, bugs, tests, refactors and reviews, and an agent that checks its own changes with your project's checks, sees code diagnostics after edits and keeps notes in AGENTS.md.
• Review, fix and undo built in: /review checks your changes, /fix fixes what it found, and one /undo takes back a whole turn while keeping your own edits.
• Hosted web search for the model, when it is available for your account, with the searches and their sources shown in the chat.
• MCP servers from a supported list: filesystem, git, SQLite, memory, sequential thinking, time, Playwright on local pages, and Figma with your own key.

Models, including Claude

Every chat starts on GPT 6 Astra, and you can switch to GPT 6.1 Sol or GPT 6 Sol, and set the reasoning effort, per chat or per run (-m in the CLI). Claude Opus 5.5, Claude Sonnet 5.5 and Kimi K3.1 Pro are available in OmniRush too, and they work in the same per-project sandbox as every other model. There are no keys to set up: sign in and start. Usage limits apply, and a request may be served by an equivalent or newer model while OmniRush tests models or manages capacity, as the Terms say.

It works the way Claude Code does

If you are used to typing claude in a project folder, OmniRush feels familiar: install it with npm i -g omnirush@latest (it needs Node.js 22.19 or newer), run omnirush login once, then run omnirush in your project. Describe the task, and the agent reads the code, runs your commands and edits files, asking before risky actions. Use -p for one-shot runs in scripts, pipes and CI.

$ npm i -g omnirush@latest
$ omnirush login
$ cd my-project
$ omnirush

A project's AGENTS.md is read as it is, so the instructions you already keep for agents carry over. Prefer a window? The desktop app runs the same agent with the same account.

How to switch

1. Create your account and connect your GitHub account.
2. Read the Terms and the Privacy Policy, which together are the data agreement, and accept them when you sign up.
3. Install the CLI with npm i -g omnirush@latest, or download the desktop app.
4. Run omnirush login, open your project and give it the task you would give Claude Code.
5. Review the diff, run your tests, and commit when you are happy.

OmniRush is not affiliated with or endorsed by Anysphere (Cursor), Anthropic (Claude, Claude Code), Cognition (Windsurf, Devin), Moonshot AI (Kimi), Anomaly (opencode), the Freebuff and Codebuff team, OpenAI (GPT, Codex), Microsoft (Windows), Apple (macOS) or Figma. Product names are trademarks of their owners and are used only to identify their products.