Is OpenCode free?

OpenCode is free. The program is open source under the MIT licence (anomalyco/opencode), installs with npm, Homebrew, Scoop, pacman, Nix, or a curl script, and runs without an account: opencode in a repository, /connect to point it at a model, and you are working. No trial, no seat, no paid tier of the tool itself. The desktop app and the IDE extension are free too.

What is not free is the model. Every message you send goes to a large language model, and whoever serves that model charges for it — per token, or through a subscription with limits. OpenCode is unusual in how many ways it lets you pay that bill, from keys you already hold, to a subscription it sells itself, to a model on your own GPU. The table is the whole answer; the rest of the page is the fine print.

Three of those routes can cost nothing, and each has a catch worth knowing before you plan around it. Copilot Free is real but small — GitHub’s plan page caps it at 2,000 completions and 50 chat requests a month, and an agent that reads, edits, and retries spends requests quickly. Zen’s free models are genuinely free, but the list is whichever models the OpenCode team is offering at no charge at the time, not the frontier ones. A local model through Ollama costs nothing per token and everything up front: a GPU with enough memory for a coding-capable model, and the honest gap between that model and the ones the paid routes serve.

The paid routes differ in how the meter runs. API keys bill exactly what the agent used, which is transparent and occasionally alarming — an agent loop reads far more than it writes. Subscriptions (ChatGPT, Copilot, Go) trade that for a ceiling: a flat amount, and limits instead of a surprise. Which is cheaper depends on how much you run; if you are weighing a subscription against tokens, the plan calculator does that arithmetic for Anthropic’s plans, and the reasoning transfers. Whatever the route, the levers are the same: start in the plan agent to read the approach before it edits, keep AGENTS.md short and true, and /compact a session before it grows a long tail.

The last thing OpenCode needs is a computer to run on, and that is the one cost no licence can remove. It runs on your laptop, which closes; or on a desktop or a server, which you then have to reach. If the agent is going to work for an hour on a machine you own, the question becomes how you check on it from somewhere else, and how it asks you something at the moment it needs to. That is what spawnd does: one daemon on each host you own, dialing out so nothing listens and no port opens; sessions that live on the host and survive the closed tab and the laptop lid; and any browser as the console, a phone included. OpenCode is a built-in shortcut, and it signs into ChatGPT, Copilot, or your keys on the host exactly as it does today — spawnd holds no provider credentials and adds no API-key markup. The tool stays free and the machine stays yours; if the open question is the tool itself, OpenCode vs Aider takes it up.