iFlow CLI shutdown: what still works and where to migrate

iFlow CLI's first-party service shut down on April 17, 2026, but the client did not: iFlow's own FAQ says an installed copy keeps working through a custom API, and npm still serves @iflow-ai/iflow-cli 0.5.19, published April 25, 2026 — eight days after the announced closure — undeprecated. So the migration question is not "what replaces a dead tool". It is whether to keep the agent you have on your own endpoint, or leave for one that is still maintained.

Almost every page still ranking for this describes a free first-party model service that ended. The vendor's own marketing page has not caught up either: on September 21, 2026, cli.iflow.cn serves, in its English interface, a banner reading "iFlow CLI will officially shut down on April 17, 2026 (Beijing Time)" in the future tense, five months after the date, on the same page that still invites you to "experience the latest industry models like Kimi K2, Qwen3 Coder, GLM4.5 at zero cost" above a working Gitee install command. Read that page as an artifact, not an offer. This guide is for people who already have iFlow CLI installed; it does not suggest signing up for it now.

What shut down, and what is still running

Three different things wear the iFlow name and only one of them closed. All statuses below were checked on September 21, 2026.

One disambiguation, because it dominates the search results: SAP's "iFlow" means Integration Flow, a BPMN artifact in SAP Integration Suite. It shares a name with this product and nothing else. Nothing on this page applies to it.

Which route fits which user

Everyone leaving is leaving the same thing — a free first-party model service — so every route below costs money that did not exist before. That, rather than a price comparison, is the real change.

iFlow nominated Qoder itself, describing it in the farewell post as the strongest agentic coding platform launched by Alibaba. Treat that attribution as iFlow's claim about Qoder: the four docs.qoder.com pages read for this guide name no parent company, and the only legal entity in their footer is "© 2026 BRIGHT ZENITH PRIVATE LIMITED". The same post announced a 300-credit migration benefit registered by email at platform.iflow.cn/email-collect; on September 21, 2026 that URL still answers HTTP 200 but renders a page reading "404 - Page Not Found" and, in Chinese, that it has been taken offline. Treat the offer as historical rather than claimable.

Keeping iFlow CLI on your own endpoint

The post that documents this, published March 20, 2026, states that iFlow CLI automatically changed its authorisation on April 17 to support only OpenAI-compatible API authorisation with custom models. Its interactive route is four steps: choose "OpenAI Compatible API" at the login screen, then enter the service endpoint URL, the API key and the model name. The file and environment routes below are taken from iFlow's settings documentation, read on September 21, 2026.

# The shape iFlow's OWN documentation publishes for a custom endpoint.
# Not a Kunavo runtime test: nothing here was installed or executed.
# iFlow's worked example puts /v1 on the base URL, and not the
# /chat/completions route.
export IFLOW_baseUrl="https://api.kunavo.com/v1"
export IFLOW_apiKey="sk-kn-..."
export IFLOW_modelName="claude-sonnet-4-6"
iflow

# Every setting accepts four spellings, so all of these name the same value:
#   IFLOW_apiKey | IFLOW_API_KEY | iflow_apiKey | iflow_API_KEY

The same three values live in a settings file. iFlow documents the precedence as command-line parameters, then environment variables, then system settings, then .iflow/settings.json in the project, then ~/.iflow/settings.json, then built-in defaults.

{
  "selectedAuthType": "openai-compatible",
  "baseUrl": "https://api.kunavo.com/v1",
  "apiKey": "sk-kn-...",
  "modelName": "claude-sonnet-4-6"
}

One trap in that page. It documents exactly two values for selectedAuthType — iflow for the vendor's own authentication and openai-compatible for, in its words, any model service provider that offers OpenAI protocol — and then prints an Example line carrying a third string that matches neither. Use the documented value, not the example.

iFlow publishes the cost of this route as a flat list: a custom model service does not support the WebSearch service, does not support the WebFetch service, does not support built-in multimodal capability, and does not benefit from tool-calling optimisation. The third item quietly removes the Ctrl+V image paste the README advertises. Separately, platform.iflow.cn/market returns 404, so the one-click marketplace appears gone too — an observed status code rather than a published statement.

Before you edit anything, copy the whole ~/.iflow directory. Rolling back to the vendor's own authentication is not a real fallback, because that is the path iFlow announced closed on April 17, 2026 — so the honest rollback is a second client installed alongside, not a reverted config. None of this was runtime-tested here: iFlow CLI has not been executed against Kunavo's endpoint, and the steps above are iFlow's documentation rather than a measured result.

What the official migration script moves, and what it leaves

iFlow attached migrate_iflow_to_qoder.py to its migration guide of March 18, 2026. The script itself was not fetched or run here, but its published mapping table is a useful inventory of what is portable at all — even if your destination is Qwen Code rather than Qoder.

iFlow CLI vs Qwen Code

Qwen Code is the closest like-for-like move and the difference that matters is maintenance, not features. On September 21, 2026 it is Apache-2.0 with more than 28,000 stars, was pushed that same day, ships npm 0.24.3 published hours earlier, and sits in Homebrew core at 0.24.2. iFlow CLI has no Homebrew core formula and no GitHub release; its repository carries no tags at all and publishes no source — only a Homebrew formula of its own, pinned to the npm tarball for 0.5.14.

Its authentication documentation offers three top-level options in the /auth menu: Alibaba ModelStudio, a list of built-in third-party providers, and a Custom Provider that, in its own words, manually connects a local server, proxy, or unsupported provider and supports OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini and other compatible endpoints. Configuration lives under modelProviders in ~/.qwen/settings.json, with OPENAI_API_KEY, OPENAI_BASE_URL and OPENAI_MODEL as the environment route. That is a genuinely free-form base URL, and it is the one thing iFlow CLI and Qwen Code plainly have in common. Whether Qoder CLI offers the same is contested by Qoder's own pages; that is taken up below rather than settled here.

Two corrections to what most competing pages say. First, Qwen Code the client is free, but its inference is not: the same doc states the Qwen OAuth free tier was discontinued on April 15, 2026 and that OAuth is no longer a selectable entry in the /auth dialog, so tutorials still promising a free OAuth tier describe something that ended; the doc states the discontinuation without publishing what the quota had been. Second, moving to Qwen Code does not by itself recover iFlow's lost web search. Its web-search documentation marks the built-in tool "off" for third-party providers, custom endpoints on other hosts, and local models. It can still be pointed at a separate verified DashScope key through tools.webSearch.model, and the doc otherwise suggests an MCP search provider — which is the same answer an iFlow CLI user needs. See Qwen Code pricing and Qwen Code vs Claude Code for the inference side.

Qoder CLI: the blessed path is the most gated

Qoder CLI's authentication page states that authentication is required before using Qoder, and documents two methods: interactive sign-in, or a personal access token set through QODER_PERSONAL_ACCESS_TOKEN. No third-party-key-only path is documented. Its custom-models page goes further: do not configure BYOK manually in settings.json, it says, because the available providers, models and credential fields are determined by the BYOK catalog available to the current account. Kunavo's Qoder vs Claude Code guide notes that a September 11, 2026 release note is reported to announce custom URL endpoints, which pulls the other way; that contradiction is unresolved, and this page asserts neither side.

These are Qoder's published individual plans, from docs.qoder.com/account/pricing on September 21, 2026. Teams and enterprise are priced separately and were not checked.

Two caveats. Plan credits do not roll over — the page states they reset to zero when the subscription period ends. And the BYOK gate is genuinely ambiguous: the pricing page lists bring-your-own-key as a Free-plan benefit while the CLI custom-models page is marked "Available edition: Individual plan", and whether Free counts could not be established. Confirm in checkout before paying for BYOK you may already have, or may not get.

What the tokens cost on your own endpoint

The models iFlow advertised — Kimi K2, Qwen3 Coder, GLM4.5 — are not on Kunavo's shelf, so this is a change of model as well as a change of bill. The figures below are illustrative token arithmetic, not measured task costs and not a bill ceiling. Assume one session that sends 200,000 uncached input tokens and receives 15,000 output tokens, at live Kunavo catalog rates per million tokens.

Scale by your own sessions per day before treating this as a budget, and note that an agent loop re-sends context on every turn, so a working day is many sessions rather than one. Kunavo's catalog amount is a billing floor rather than a cap: when the upstream reports its charge, the bill is the greater of catalog cost and upstream cost times the applicable markup. Cache charges and external tools sit outside this example. The minimum top-up is $10 in prepaid credit — a funding minimum, not a task fee or a subscription. See billing details.

Verify the move before you trust it

Whichever route you pick, run one bounded task and read what your account actually recorded for it, rather than trusting a configuration that merely started without an error. Kunavo publishes a setup page for Qwen Code; that is a published configuration reference, not a compatibility test, and iFlow CLI has no setup page here because it has not been runtime-tested against this endpoint. Start at the Qwen Code integration guide or the Qoder integration guide, and create a Kunavo account when you are ready to fund a key. For the wider landscape, the agent API directory lists iFlow CLI among the retired projects, and OpenAI-compatible API covers what a base URL field is really asking for.

FAQ

Checked September 21, 2026: iFlow's farewell and configuration posts, its README and settings documentation, both npm packages, the GitHub API, cli.iflow.cn and its i18n bundle, six platform.iflow.cn and apis.iflow.cn responses, Homebrew, the Qwen Code auth and web-search docs, and four docs.qoder.com pages. No client was installed or executed, so every configuration step here is documentation rather than a tested result. Kunavo token rates come from the live catalog and every dollar figure is illustrative arithmetic.