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

The AI coding revolution is here, but it comes with a price tag that stings. <a href="https://chat.allwinchina.org/ai-tools/claude-code/" title="Claude Code review”>Claude Code, Anthropic’s terminal-based AI agent that writes, debugs, and deploys code autonomously, has been a darling among developers. But its pricing—$20 to $200 per month depending on usage—has sparked a quiet rebellion among the very people it’s supposed to help.

Enter Goose, an open-source AI agent developed by Block (the fintech company formerly known as Square). It offers nearly identical functionality to Claude Code but runs entirely on your local machine. No subscription fees. No cloud dependency. No rate limits that reset every five hours. And yes, it works offline—even on an airplane.

“Your data stays with you, period,” said Parth Sareen, a software engineer who demonstrated the tool during a recent livestream. That line captures the core appeal: complete control over your AI-powered workflow, without handing over your code or your wallet.

The project has exploded in popularity. Goose now boasts over 26,100 stars on GitHub, with 362 contributors and 102 releases since its launch. The latest version, 1.20.1, shipped on January 19, 2026—a development pace that rivals commercial products. For developers frustrated by Claude Code’s pricing structure and usage caps, Goose represents something increasingly rare in the AI industry: a genuinely free, no-strings-attached option for serious work.

The Claude Code pricing controversy

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

Anthropic, the San Francisco AI company founded by former OpenAI executives, offers Claude Code as part of its subscription tiers. The free plan provides no access whatsoever. The Pro plan, at $17 per month with annual billing (or $20 monthly), limits users to just 10 to 40 prompts every five hours—a constraint that serious developers exhaust within minutes of intensive work.

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 Anthropic’s most powerful model, Claude 4.5 Opus. But even these premium tiers come with restrictions that have inflamed the developer community.

In late July, Anthropic announced new weekly rate limits. Under the system, Pro users receive 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 has not subsided.

The problem? Those “hours” are not actual hours. They represent token-based limits that vary wildly depending on codebase size, conversation length, and the complexity of the code being processed. 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 new restrictions “a joke” and “unusable for real work.”

Anthropic has defended the changes, stating that the limits affect fewer than five percent of users and target people running Claude Code “continuously in the background, 24/7.” But the company has not 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 for processing, Goose can run entirely on your local computer using open-source language models that you download and control yourself.

The project’s documentation describes it as going “beyond code suggestions” to “install, execute, edit, and test” code autonomously. It integrates directly with your terminal, allowing it to read and write files, run commands, and even interact with APIs—all without sending your data to a third-party server.

This local-first approach has several advantages. First, it’s free. No subscription, no per-token charges, no surprise bills at the end of the month. Second, it’s private. Your code never leaves your machine, which is a big deal for developers working on proprietary software or sensitive projects. Third, it works offline. You can fire up Goose on a plane, in a coffee shop with spotty Wi-Fi, or in a secure facility with no internet access.

The trade-off, of course, is that you need a reasonably powerful machine to run local language models. But with models like Llama 3.1 running on consumer hardware, this is becoming less of a barrier every day. Goose also supports cloud-based models as an option, but the core value proposition is local control.

Why this matters for the AI coding landscape

The rise of Goose signals something important: the AI coding market is not going to be dominated by expensive, proprietary tools forever. Developers are voting with their stars and their forks.

Claude Code is a genuinely impressive product. When it works, it can save hours of tedious work. But Anthropic’s pricing strategy feels like it was designed for enterprise customers who don’t care about a few hundred dollars a month, not for independent developers, freelancers, or small teams. The rate limits are opaque and punitive, and the company’s communication around them has been defensive at best.

Goose is not a perfect clone. It doesn’t have access to Anthropic’s most powerful models, and the open-source models you run locally are not yet at the same level as Claude 4.5 Opus. But for many tasks—refactoring code, writing unit tests, debugging errors, automating repetitive tasks—Goose is more than adequate. And it’s free.

The question now is whether Anthropic will respond. The company could lower prices, increase limits, or offer a truly unlimited plan for a reasonable flat fee. Or it could double down on its current strategy, betting that developers will grumble but pay up anyway. Based on the GitHub activity around Goose, that bet might not pay off.

I’ve been watching this space for years, and I’ve seen this pattern before. A proprietary tool gets popular, then gets greedy, and an open-source alternative emerges to eat its lunch. It happened with databases, with operating systems, with development tools. Now it’s happening with AI coding agents. Goose is not the last open-source AI coding tool we’ll see, but it might be the first one that actually matters.