I recently posted on X that we have access to so many tokens that I’m running out of ideas what to build.
At DataTalks.Club we’re running AI Dev Tools Zoomcamp and people are asking me where they can get access to coding agents for free or without paying a lot of money. So I figured I should take that post from X and turn it into an article.
While I do recommend getting a paid Codex or Claude subscription and use it for the course, there are some other providers that can get you a lot of tokens for less money or even for free.
In this post, I’ll share some of them. We’ll cover
Free coding plans
Cheap coding plans
Current promotions
Let’s go!
Free coding plans
There are multiple platforms that currently offer free coding plans.
One of them is Tencent. They recently released Hy3 and now offer a free tier through its WorkBuddy and CodeBuddy assistants. It’s not available in Germany, so I couldn’t try it - but maybe it’ll work for you.
Another one is OpenCode Zen. They have a variety of models absolutely for free. One of these models is Muse Spark 1.3 from Meta.
The full name for this model is “Muse Spark 1.3 Contributor Free”. The “contributor” part here means that you’re “contributing” your data to Meta. That is, they can use your data to improve their model. That’s why it’s free - you pay for it with your data.
For me it’s not a concern. It’s quite a powerful model, it feels like Opus 5 level. I can have one or two heavy coding sessions with Muse 1.3 in OpenCode Zen absolutely for free.
Once I hit the limits, I can stay in OpenCode and switch the session to OpenCode Go - their coding plan.
Affordable coding plans
OpenCode Go costs $10 per month. For this $10 you get a lot. Specifically, you get the same Muse 1.3 Contributor, although without the “free” part.
Again, it’s a contributor model, so Meta is subsidizing 90% of the cost - at least this is what they say. And you can get a lot done with this model. Combine it with 1-2 free sessions from OpenCode Zen, and you’ll get 5+ hours of work per day with this plan.
And there are other models, like DeepSeek V4.1 Flash, which currently offers 75% discount (i.e. 4x more usage).
I used to recommend GitHub Copilot as the first coding plan. Not anymore - now it’s OpenCode Go.
Other cheap alternatives in the same $8-20 range:
ChatGPT Plus ($20)
MiniMax Token Plan ($20)
Command Code GOAT ($10)
Prices and quotas change fast, so check the current plan pages.
Cheap API access
So far we talked about coding plans. Instead, you can pay for API calls yourself and plug any API LLM platform to your coding agent.
If you do that directly with OpenAI or Anthropic and put $5 into your account, they will disappear before you can say “hello” to your coding agent.
But if you use DeepSeek’s V4.1 Flash during off-peak hours, you’ll be getting millions of tokens, which is enough to do multiple coding sessions.
Also, OpenRouter gives access to many free and cheap models. Any model ID ending in :free costs zero tokens. The rate limits are very strict though, but once you pay, the limits are lifted.
Current promotions
I really like Z.ai. I have used them since September last year through their API, and I’ve been using their coding plan since December.
Now they are regularly running promotions and giving away 300 million tokens for glm-5.3-flash. You have to use their Zcode harness, and the promotions are typically timed for weekends. It’s a lot of tokens - many people complain that these tokens expire before they can spend them.
Additionally, right now they are running a promo for all Z.ai coding plan subscribers. If you’re one of them, you get unlimited glm-5.3-flash tokens from 5pm to 3am CET.
Well, they aren’t completely “unlimited” - there are still rate-limits. But I don’t hit these limits unless I run 20+ agents in parallel.
That plus 300m tokens plus their quota reduction if you use Zcode - that combined gives you a lot of tokens.
One downside of Zcode is that it’s GUI only, no TUI. But I figured out how to connect it to Codex, so I can run Zcode from my terminal.
Z.ai is not the only company that runs promos. There are others:
Tencent Cloud TokenHub gives every new account 1M free tokens per model, covering DeepSeek V4 Pro/Flash, GLM-5, MiniMax M3 and Kimi K2.6.
Verdant currently offers GLM 5.3 Flash and DeepSeek V4 Flash for free within 5-hour and weekly limits.
Cursor doubled included usage for its first-party models (Auto, Composer 2.5) on paid plans.
Cognition (the company behind Devin) just released a new model SWE-2 and they made it unlimited in Devin paid plans.
Build more
With all these free models and promotions I no longer have a problem of having no tokens. My main problem is deciding what to build next.
I hope you’ll have the same problem. Have fun and enjoy building!
Tools
I haven’t included the section with new tools for quite some time. Now I want to fix it.
engrim: a local-first SQLite memory engine that keeps one project-scoped episodic store across Antigravity, Claude Code, Cursor, Windsurf, and Codex. With their approach it’s very easy to switch models in the middle of a session, and you don’t need to send the whole session transcript when doing it.
oto-dock: “The brains of your company, built on Claude Code & Codex, working on your Anthropic and OpenAI subscriptions.” It’s a self-hosted company OS where agents organized in departments connect to company tools, delegate to each other, and keep working unattended. I’m experimenting with automating as much of DataTalks.Club ops as I can, so this project looks promising.