Claude Code costs up to $200 a month. Goose does the same thing for free.

The AI coding revolution has a dirty secret: it’s expensive. <a href="https://biz.allwinchina.org/ai-tools/claude-code/" title="Claude Code review”>Claude Code, Anthropic’s terminal-based agent that writes, debugs, and deploys code autonomously, has developers hooked. But the pricing — $20 to $200 a month depending on usage — is sparking a quiet rebellion among the very people it’s supposed to help.

Enter Goose, an open-source AI agent from Block (the company formerly known as Square). It does almost everything Claude Code does, but runs entirely on your local machine. No subscription. No cloud dependency. No rate limits that reset every five hours.

“Your data stays with you, period,” said Parth Sareen, a software engineer who demoed the tool during a livestream. That’s the core pitch: complete control over your AI workflow, including the ability to work offline — even on an airplane.

Goose has exploded in popularity. It now has over 26,100 stars on GitHub, 362 contributors, and 102 releases since launch. The latest version, 1.20.1, shipped on January 19, 2026. That’s a development pace that rivals any commercial product.

For developers frustrated by Claude Code’s pricing and usage caps, Goose represents something increasingly rare: a genuinely free, no-strings-attached option for serious work.

The Claude Code pricing mess

To understand why Goose matters, you need to understand the controversy around Claude Code’s pricing.

Anthropic offers Claude Code as part of its subscription tiers. The free plan gives you zero access. The Pro plan, at $17 per month with annual billing ($20 monthly), limits you to 10 to 40 prompts every five hours — which serious developers burn through in minutes.

The Max plans, at $100 and $200 per month, offer more headroom: 50 to 200 prompts and 200 to 800 prompts respectively, plus access to Claude 4.5 Opus. But even these premium tiers come with restrictions that have inflamed the community.

In late July, Anthropic announced new weekly rate limits. Pro users get 40 to 80 hours of Sonnet 4 usage per week. Max users at the $200 tier get 240 to 480 hours of Sonnet 4, plus 24 to 40 hours of Opus 4. Nearly five months later, the frustration hasn’t subsided.

The problem? Those “hours” aren’t actual hours. They’re token-based limits that vary wildly depending on codebase size, conversation length, and complexity. Independent analysis suggests the actual per-session limits translate to roughly 44,000 tokens for Pro users and 220,000 tokens for the $200 Max plan.

“It’s confusing and vague,” one developer wrote in a widely shared analysis. “When they say ’24-40 hours of Opus 4,’ that doesn’t really tell you anything useful about what you’re actually getting.”

The backlash on Reddit and developer forums has been fierce. Some users report hitting their daily limits within 30 minutes of intensive coding. Others have canceled their subscriptions entirely, calling the restrictions “a joke” and “unusable for real work.”

Anthropic has defended the changes, claiming the limits affect fewer than five percent of users and target people running Claude Code “continuously in the background, 24/7.” But the company hasn’t clarified whether that figure refers to five percent of Max subscribers or five percent of all users — a distinction that matters enormously.

How Block built a free AI coding agent that works offline

Goose takes a radically different approach to the same problem.

Built by Block, the payments company led by Jack Dorsey, Goose is what engineers call an “on-machine AI agent.” Unlike Claude Code, which sends your queries to Anthropic’s servers, Goose can run entirely on your local computer using open-source language models you download and control.

The project’s documentation describes it as going “beyond code suggestions” to “install, execute, edit, and test” code. It integrates directly with your terminal, editor, and development tools. You give it a task, and it figures out the rest — fetching dependencies, writing tests, running commands, iterating on failures.

This is higher than I expected from a free tool, honestly. Most open-source AI agents are either too limited or too buggy for real work. Goose feels different. The release cadence alone — 102 releases in what looks like less than a year — suggests a team that’s serious about quality.

The local-first design has another advantage: privacy. With Claude Code, every prompt goes through Anthropic’s infrastructure. With Goose, you can use a local model like Llama or Mistral, keeping everything on your machine. For developers working with proprietary code or in regulated industries, that’s a big deal.

The real trade-offs

Let’s be clear: Goose isn’t perfect. Local models are smaller and less capable than Claude 4.5 Opus. If you’re working on complex refactoring or need deep reasoning, you’ll feel the difference. The project also requires some setup — you need to install Python, configure the models, and understand how the agent works.

But for day-to-day coding tasks — writing boilerplate, fixing bugs, running tests — Goose holds its own. And the price is hard to beat.

What’s interesting is how this mirrors the broader AI market. Companies like Anthropic and OpenAI are racing to build more powerful models, but they’re also building walls around them. Usage caps, tiered pricing, vague limits — it’s a familiar playbook from the SaaS era. Goose represents the counter-movement: open-source, local-first, no gatekeeping.

Block’s involvement is also worth noting. Jack Dorsey has been vocal about his support for open-source AI and Bitcoin. Goose feels like a concrete expression of that philosophy — a free tool that gives developers control rather than locking them into a subscription.

The bottom line

Claude Code is a powerful tool, but its pricing model is increasingly hard to justify for individual developers and small teams. Goose doesn’t match its raw capability, but it doesn’t need to. For most coding tasks, it’s good enough — and it’s free.

The real question is whether Anthropic will respond. The company has a loyal user base, but the backlash is real. If enough developers defect to open-source alternatives, the pressure to reform pricing will grow.

For now, Goose is worth trying. Install it, point it at a project, and see what happens. You might be surprised at how far local AI has come.