Anthropic’s decision to remove Claude Code from the $20 monthly plan directly spawned a phenomenon-level open-source project.
free-claude-code topped GitHub Trending this week with 16,154 new Stars, reaching 18.6k total Stars and over 2.6k Forks. The project has 547 commits, with the latest security fix (constant-time comparison for auth tokens) merged 9 hours ago.
What Happened
In late April, Anthropic adjusted Claude Code’s pricing, removing it from the Pro plan ($20/month). free-claude-code provides an open-source alternative:
- Multi-platform: Terminal CLI, VSCode extension, Discord bot
- Voice integration: Voice interaction similar to OpenClaw
- Multi-model support: GPT, Gemini, DeepSeek model switching
- Anthropic protocol compatibility: Direct native Anthropic Messages API calls
Technical Architecture
The project uses a modular design:
free-claude-code/
├── api/ # API layer, Anthropic protocol support
├── cli/ # Command-line terminal
├── config/ # Multi-model configuration
├── core/ # Core engine
├── messaging/ # Discord/Telegram messaging layer
└── providers/ # Multi-provider adaptersKey highlights include full SSE stream support, including fixes for null usage in OpenAI-compatible streams and native Anthropic Messages transport for DeepSeek.
Quick Start
git clone https://github.com/Alishahryar1/free-claude-code.git
cd free-claude-code
export ANTHROPIC_API_KEY="your-key"
npm run cliNotes
- Project is under rapid iteration; APIs may have breaking changes
- Recent security fix for auth token timing attacks — keep updated
- Requires your own API Key; billed per Anthropic official API rates
- Some advanced features (like subagent orchestration) are not fully implemented yet