Cline pricing: the agent is free, and the cheap model has terms

Cline is provider-agnostic by design, and the vendor says so more loudly than most: its enterprise page argues that most tools force you to buy inference through them with markup, and that this one connects directly to your providers with none. The claim is attractive and, as published, unverifiable — the gateway lists four hundred and fifty-eight model names on an open endpoint and no prices, and the endpoints that would carry rates require a key. So the question this page can actually close is the neighbouring one: when the vendor prints other companies' prices, is it printing them correctly?

It prints fourteen of them. The monthly pass publishes a reference table of per-million-token rates for the models it includes, describing them as the underlying rates and as an aid to understanding how usage is measured against the quota. We joined that table to our own snapshot, which is read off each model vendor's page and dated per row, and re-read three of those vendors' pages the same day. Twelve of the fourteen rows hold. Six were confirmed against the model vendor's own page on the day of writing, including both halves of DeepSeek's peak and off-peak split, which the table gets exactly right down to the cached-read column. One row we decline to judge: a context-tiered Qwen rate we carry as a single figure rather than two.

The row that fails is instructive precisely because it fails cleanly. For one MiMo model the table prints figures that are exactly four times what the model's maker publishes today, on the input column, the output column and the cached-read column alike. A single mistyped digit is a typo; the same multiplier across three columns is a systematic one. What we can say is that the reference rate is four times the maker's published rate. What we cannot say is that the quota drains four times faster, because the vendor never states that the meter uses these numbers — it says the table helps you understand the measurement, and the prose has to stop where the vendor stopped.

The other near-miss turned out not to be a miss at all, and it is the most useful thing on this page. The cheapest line on the rate card is a contributor-tier model, priced at a tenth of what its standard tier costs per million input tokens — and the maker's own documentation explains the gap in one sentence: heavily discounted pricing in exchange for permission to use your prompts and completions to train future models. The standard tier of the identical model carries the opposite promise, that prompts and completions are not used for training. So the rate card is right to the cent, our snapshot was simply missing a tier, and the twelve-and-a-half-fold difference between two rows of one model is not a discount. It is a price paid in something other than money.

Cancellation itself is unremarkable and works the way it should: notify before the next term begins, through the same route you signed up by or by writing to support, and access continues to the end of the period you paid for. The terms then close every door behind it. Fees are payable in advance, payment obligations are non-cancelable once incurred, and fees paid are non-refundable. The refund clause names the specific hope it is removing — no refund for unused credits, for unused time, for pre-payments, or for any portion of the service — and adds that any refund at all is at the vendor's sole discretion.

Read that next to a clause five sections earlier, because the combination is the part worth acting on: the vendor reserves the right to suspend or permanently terminate access with or without notice, with or without cause, and for any or no reason. A prepaid balance is therefore money held at somebody else's discretion with no promise of return, which is an argument for topping up in small amounts rather than annually. Unlike the two vendors in this section whose refund and cancellation articles contradicted each other, both clauses here agree, and both agree against the buyer.

One gap sits underneath all of it. The terms make a separate document — Pricing and Payment Terms — the governing text for prices and the order of payment, and incorporate it by reference. We could not find it published. Six plausible paths return 404, the sitemap's hundred and thirty-one URLs contain nothing resembling it, and the terms page links only to the privacy notice; the footer was checked too, since a vendor covered earlier in this section published its terms nowhere else. The terms themselves carry a modification date of September 2025, which is a year before the subscription they would have to govern went on sale.