Anomaly · opencode
opencode: a coding agent that sells you nothing
Free software with fifty-two ways to attach a model — and a vendor whose own price claim we could check.
opencode is an open-source coding agent for the terminal, made by Anomaly and licensed MIT. The client is free and always will be; what costs money is the model you attach, through any of fifty-two providers, your own hardware, or the vendor's own gateway. We have not run it ourselves — everything here is read from its documentation and repository, dated and linked.
What it is.
Start with the identity, because three different things answer to this name.
opencode is an AI coding agent that runs in your terminal, with a desktop application and editor extensions alongside it. It reads a codebase, answers questions about it, and edits files and runs commands when you let it. The client is MIT-licensed, the repository is anomalyco/opencode, and the company behind it is Anomaly. At the time of writing the project reports 202,000 stars and 950 contributors, and the current release is v1.18.23, published three days before this page.
The name is the first thing to get straight, and the vendor knows it: its own README asks other projects using "opencode" in their name to state in their README that they are not built by this team. A separate repository under a similar name ranks alongside it in search, and the word turns up in unrelated tooling. If you are comparing notes with someone, compare repository URLs rather than names.
What makes it structurally different from the other agents in this section is that there is no product to buy. Claude Code is sold inside a Claude subscription; Codex is sold inside a ChatGPT plan and metered in credits. opencode is given away, and the vendor instead sells model access two ways alongside it — a pay-as-you-go gateway and a low-cost subscription to open-weight models — while documenting fifty-two other providers you could use instead, including running the model on your own machine. Its stated position is no lock-in, in both directions: use its gateway with a different agent, or use a different provider with its agent.
That claim is the sort we can actually test rather than repeat, so we did. The vendor says its gateway sells models at cost and adds only card processing. We took its published rate card and joined it to the twenty-five models we price independently from the labs' own pages: twenty-three matched to the cent, and the two that did not were cheaper on the gateway, not dearer. One of those carries a dated discount note on their page; the other carries no note at all. We have not run the tool itself — there are no test runs of ours behind this page, and where a claim needs evidence we do not have, it says so.
Nothing, and then whatever the model costs. There is no paid edition of the client and no tier to upgrade to, so every route on the pricing page buys a model rather than the program. Point it at a model on your own hardware and the bill is genuinely zero. Point it at a key and you pay the lab directly, unmarked-up. Or take one of the vendor's own two routes — a per-token gateway, or a subscription whose ceiling is unusual enough to be worth reading about: it is denominated in dollars of usage at a published rate, rather than in messages, credits or an unexplained window.
| Route | Bought as | Price |
|---|---|---|
| Local model | Own hardware | Your hardware |
| Your own API key | API key | At model rates |
| OpenCode Zen | API key | At model rates |
| OpenCode Go | Subscription | $10/mo |
| ChatGPT Plus | Subscription | $20/mo |
| GitHub Copilot Pro | Per seat | $10/seat/mo |
| Enterprise | Per seat | Contact sales |
Who it is wrong for.
Structural reasons rather than complaints about quality — cases where no amount of configuration makes this the right tool.
Seven tools, grouped by the reason you would actually leave — wanting a subscription instead of a meter, wanting an editor instead of a terminal, wanting a different open-source licence, or wanting somebody accountable. Each carries its own published entry price, read on the day of writing.
Frequently asked.
What people search next.