Cline Bot Inc. · Cline
Cline: free software, and three different deals on your code
An Apache-2.0 coding agent that runs in VS Code, JetBrains, a terminal, an SDK and its own desktop app — sold to you never, and cheapest exactly where the vendor's terms take the most.
Cline is an open-source coding agent under Apache-2.0, and no edition of it is for sale. Seven routes reach a model: your own hardware, your own key, the vendor's gateway metered in plain dollars, its own flat monthly pass, a Claude or an OpenAI subscription you may already hold, and an enterprise seat. The cheaper the route, the more its terms ask of your code.
What Cline actually is
The queue sent this one over labelled a coding agent, and for once the label needs no correction — worth saying out loud after a section in which one tool turned out to be a personal assistant, another turned out to be its vendor's other product with a nearly identical name, and a third shared its name with a fashion house. Cline is what it says: a program that reads your repository, plans a change, edits files, runs commands, checks the result in a browser and keeps a checkpoint you can roll back to. Its plan-then-act split is the product's signature — you approve an approach before it touches anything.
It is unusually many places at once. There is a VS Code extension, a JetBrains plugin, a command-line tool, an SDK for building on the same engine, a Kanban surface, and a native desktop app for macOS and Windows. The extension also runs inside Cursor, Windsurf, Antigravity and Zed, and reaches Neovim over ACP. One account covers all of them. The licence is Apache-2.0 rather than the MIT other open agents in this section use, which adds a patent grant and an obligation to mark your changes.
Commercially the shape is familiar and the detail is not. Nothing here is a trial: the client is free software with no paid edition above it, so every route below buys model access instead of the product. What makes Cline different from the other free clients we have covered is that its own vendor also sells inference — a pay-as-you-go gateway that meters in dollars, and a flat monthly pass to a shortlist of open-weight models. And the pass publishes a rate card for other companies' models, which means its claims can be checked against the prices those companies publish. On the day we looked, twelve of its fourteen rows matched to the cent and one was out by exactly four times.
We have not run it. Every route except a local model requires a Cline account, and this desk does not create accounts or enter passwords. So nothing on these three pages is a verdict from use: it is the vendor's own documentation, terms, privacy notice and rate card, read on the date stamped at the top, plus the arithmetic our own price snapshot allows. Where the vendor's documents disagree with each other — and they do, in five places — we publish both sides rather than choosing one.
Seven routes, and the agent is not for sale on any of them. One reaches a true zero. The interesting part is not the ladder of prices but what sits underneath it: the vendor's terms take a licence over your content on the free and cheap routes, and release it only on the per-seat tier.
| Route | Bought as | Price |
|---|---|---|
| Local model | Own hardware | Your hardware |
| Your own API key | API key | At model rates |
| Cline gateway (pay as you go) | API key | At model rates |
| ClinePass | Subscription | $9.99/mo |
| Claude Pro | Subscription | $20/mo $17/mo billed annually |
| ChatGPT Plus | Subscription | $20/mo |
| Cline Enterprise | Per seat | Contact Sales |
When the honest answer is use something else
One published pair covers Cline so far, and it is the one the money question leads to. Pairs live in /compare/ and get written there rather than twice.
| Pair | What it decides | Verified |
|---|---|---|
| Cline vs Cursor | Two cost models rather than two intelligences: a free client where you pay the model vendor directly, against a subscription that bundles third-party usage and adds its own autocomplete. The pair does the break-even arithmetic. | 2026-07-27 |
Four reasons people look past Cline, and a different shortlist behind each one. Organised by why you are going rather than by rank.
Frequently asked.
What people search next.
Q · 01 Is Cline free? +
The client is, permanently: Apache-2.0, no paid edition, and the vendor's own pricing page calls it free for individual developers. What costs money is the model. The only route that reaches an actual zero is a model running on your own machine through Ollama, LM Studio or Atomic Chat — no account, no key, no network. The vendor also rotates limited-time free models for anyone with an account, but the quota is published in no unit at all and the docs say usage of those models may be used to help improve model performance.
Q · 02 What does the Cline gateway charge on top of the model? +
The pricing page says inference is sold at cost and the FAQ repeats that there is no markup. We cannot check that claim directly, because the gateway publishes no per-model rate card on the open web — the catalogue endpoint lists four hundred and fifty-eight model names and no prices, and the pricing endpoints require a key. What can be checked is the rate card the monthly pass publishes for the same model vendors' standard prices: twelve of fourteen rows matched those vendors' own published figures to the cent on the day we read them.
Q · 03 Can I use Cline with my Claude or ChatGPT subscription? +
Yes, and the documentation describes both paths. For Anthropic, Cline drives the Claude CLI, so a Pro or Max subscription covers the model and the agent adds nothing to the bill. For OpenAI, you sign in with the account behind your subscription and Cline routes through Codex without a key. In both cases the allowance, the windows and the model list stay whoever's subscription it is — Cline is not metering anything on those routes, which also means it cannot raise the ceiling.
Q · 04 Does Cline train on my code? +
Its documents answer this five different ways, so the honest reply is that it depends which route you are on. Bring your own key and route calls through your own infrastructure, and the terms state Cline does not receive or store your tokens or your code. Use a Cline account and section 3.2 of the terms takes a licence over your content to improve the service, perpetual and irrevocable in aggregated form, released only while a per-seat subscription is in force. The privacy notice adds that on Cline-supplied keys your request goes to the model provider, some of whom may use content for training unless you have opted out. Meanwhile the enterprise marketing page states flatly that your code is never used to train models. All five are the vendor's own words.
Q · 05 Is the JetBrains plugin an enterprise feature? +
The pricing page lists a JetBrains extension among the things the enterprise tier adds, which reads as a gate. The marketplace says otherwise: the plugin published by the vendor is free, with roughly three quarters of a million downloads, and the documentation lists JetBrains among the editors Cline simply works in. Note that the link in the documentation is broken in an unhelpful way — it resolves to somebody else's plugin rather than to a missing page — so search the marketplace for the vendor's name instead of following it.
Q · 06 What happens when the allowance runs out? +
Nothing degrades to a cheaper model. The gateway refuses with a payment-required error and the remedy is to add credits. The monthly pass meters against three windows at once — a five-hour rolling one, a calendar week and a calendar month — and shows the state of all three only inside the dashboard, so there is no way to see from outside how close you are. Since unused credits are explicitly non-refundable, the balance is worth keeping small.