Claude Code costs up to $200 a month. Goose does the same thing for free.
VentureBeat AI Michael Nuñez
Goose, an open-source AI coding agent developed by Block, offers the same autonomous code-writing capabilities as Claude Code but runs locally on users' machines without subscription fees or usage limits. Claude Code's pricing ranges from $20 to $200 per month with rate limits that some developers exhaust within 30 minutes of intensive work, while Goose has accumulated over 26,100 GitHub stars since launch. Developers frustrated with Anthropic's pricing structure now have a free alternative that keeps their code private and allows offline work, though it requires 32 gigabytes of RAM and lacks the model quality of Claude's Opus for the most complex tasks.
Why it matters
The artificial intelligence coding revolution comes with a catch: it's expensive.Claude Code, Anthropic's terminal-based AI agent that can write, debug, and deploy code autonomously, has captured the imagination of software developers worldwide. But its pricing — ranging from $20 to $200 per month depending on usage — has sparked a growing rebellion among the very programmers it aims to serve.Now, a free alternative is gaining traction. Goose, an open-source AI agent developed by Block (the financial technology company formerly known as Square), offers nearly identical functionality to Claude Code but runs entirely on a user's local machine. No subscription fees. No cloud dependency. No rate limits that reset every five hours."Your data stays with you, period," said Parth Sareen, a software engineer who demonstrated the tool during a recent livestream. The comment captures the core appeal: Goose gives developers complete control over their AI-powered workflow, including the ability to
