Is Claude Code free? What's free, the 7-day guest pass, and what a month costs

No, Claude Code is not free: it is not included in Claude's free plan. Only the software itself—the CLI and the extensions for VS Code and JetBrains—is free, along with a guest pass for seven days of Claude Pro, including Claude Code, that an eligible Pro or Max subscriber can give to someone who has never had a paid Claude subscription. After that, you pay for model calls, either with a subscription (Claude Pro costs $20 per month, before taxes) or without one, by token, using an API key. On Kunavo, a typical 20-step Claude Code task with Claude Sonnet 5 costs about $0.87.

As of October 10, 2026. Plans, prices, and limits come from Anthropic's pricing page, Claude Code's setup documentation, and two articles in its help center (Claude Code with Pro or Max, guest passes). Kunavo's prices come directly from Kunavo's model catalog.

What's free in Claude Code and what isn't

Claude Code is an agent: at every step, whether it reads a file, proposes a change, runs a command, or checks the result, it calls a Claude model, and an account has to pay for those calls. According to the setup documentation, Claude Code requires a Pro, Max, Team, Enterprise, or Console account; Claude.ai's free plan does not include access to Claude Code. It also works through cloud providers such as Amazon Bedrock or, as shown below, a gateway with your own API key.

Which Claude plans include Claude Code

Anthropic lists prices in US dollars, excluding taxes, at claude.com/de/pricing. How VAT is added and when each plan is worthwhile is covered in Claude Code pricing and costs.

According to the help center, Pro and Max share their allowance between Claude chat and Claude Code: everything you do in either tool counts toward the same limits. The pricing page does not give specific allowance amounts, only the Max multiplier. When the session or weekly limit is reached, you can wait for it to reset or enable extra usage credits, which are billed at standard API rates. The monthly API credits included with Max, however, cannot be used in Claude Code. And if ANTHROPIC_API_KEY is set in your shell, Claude Code uses that key instead of the subscription: API charges apply, and the allowance included with the subscription remains untouched.

The guest pass: seven days of Claude Code at no cost

The only official way to use Claude Code for free is with a guest pass. Here's how Anthropic's help center describes it:

• Who can send one: only eligible Pro and Max subscribers. They can see their passes in Claude Code with the /passes command or in Claude settings under “Claude Code,” and share a personal invitation link.
• What you get: seven days of Claude Pro, including Claude Code, Cowork, and Claude Design.
• Who can redeem one: only someone new to paid Claude subscriptions. Anyone who has already had a paid subscription is excluded.
• The catch: you provide payment details when signing up. You are charged only if you continue using Claude after the seven days; if you don't cancel, the trial automatically becomes a paid Pro subscription.
• Limited availability: each subscriber has a limited number of passes, and they can expire or be withdrawn. If they share their link with more people than they have passes, it is first come, first served.

In practice: ask someone with Pro or Max for their guest pass link, and mark the end of the seven days on your calendar if you don't want to pay afterward. Anyone who has already had a paid Claude subscription cannot redeem a guest pass; the only options left are a subscription or an API key.

Ollama, free models, leaked builds: what these tricks offer

Many guides promising “Claude Code for free” actually mean a workaround. Here's what the three most common ones really offer:

• Claude Code with Ollama. According to its own documentation, Ollama connects Claude Code to local and cloud models through an Anthropic-compatible API. The tool runs, but an open model from another provider responds, not Claude. Locally, there are no per-token fees, but the computer needs enough power: for larger repositories, Ollama recommends a context window of at least 64k tokens.
• Free models on OpenRouter. There were no Anthropic models among the free models in the OpenRouter model list as of October 10, 2026. Claude models are also charged by the token there.
• Leaked or “unlocked” builds. The CLI is free anyway; an unofficial build does not change the fact that someone has to pay for model calls—it can only swap out the model. There is also the risk: Anthropic signs its macOS and Windows program files and publishes a signed manifest with checksums alongside them (setup documentation). A build from elsewhere lacks this verification chain.

Common to all three approaches: you get the Claude Code interface, but not the model it was built for. Working with Claude costs money; the only question is how little.

What Claude Code costs without a subscription

Without a subscription, you pay per token for every model call. Because Claude Code sends the system prompt, conversation history, and fresh file context with every step, an agentic step is larger than a chat message: roughly 25,000 input tokens and 1,200 output tokens. With Claude Sonnet 5, deliberately calculated without prompt caching:

Ten tasks a month therefore cost around $8.68 on Kunavo, and the smallest top-up of $10 covers about 12 tasks. The $20 for Pro amounts to roughly 460 steps, or 23 tasks per month. If you regularly do more and can work within Pro's limits, the subscription is cheaper; if you work in bursts, the key is cheaper, since a month with no usage costs nothing. The detailed calculation, including Max, VAT, and caching, is in Claude Code pricing and costs.

The cheapest way without a subscription: your own API key

Claude Code reads ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL and works with any endpoint that speaks Anthropic's Messages API, without a plugin, proxy, or patched binary. Kunavo is an independent gateway offering the same Claude models 30% below Anthropic's list price, charged against a prepaid balance starting at $10 with no monthly fee. The shell variables:

export ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL=https://api.kunavo.com
export ANTHROPIC_AUTH_TOKEN=sk-kn-...
export ANTHROPIC_MODEL=claude-sonnet-5
export ANTHROPIC_DEFAULT_OPUS_MODEL=claude-opus-5-5
export ANTHROPIC_DEFAULT_SONNET_MODEL=claude-sonnet-5
export ANTHROPIC_DEFAULT_HAIKU_MODEL=claude-haiku-4-5

Keep the model lines. Without ANTHROPIC_MODEL, Claude Code starts with its default model, currently Opus 5.5 according to Anthropic; the line makes Claude Sonnet 5 the starting model, which is also used for the calculation above. ANTHROPIC_DEFAULT_OPUS_MODEL sets the opus alias to Opus 5.5, supported by Claude Code from version 2.1.280; on an older installation, run claude update to update. The sonnet alias requires Sonnet 5.5, which Kunavo does not offer: without ANTHROPIC_DEFAULT_SONNET_MODEL, /model sonnet, the execution phase of opusplan, and subagents configured with model: sonnet end with a 404. ANTHROPIC_DEFAULT_HAIKU_MODEL routes Claude Code's background calls to Claude Haiku 4.5.

For a permanent setup, put the variables in the env block of ~/.claude/settings.json. Remote Control and voice dictation require a claude.ai login and are unavailable with a gateway key; coding, tools, subagents, and MCP work as usual. Step-by-step installation and setup: install Claude Code.

Paying from Germany

Top-ups are made through Stripe Checkout: with Visa or Mastercard, including debit cards, with Link, with Apple Pay in Safari and on iPhone, or with Google Pay in Chrome and on Android; buyers in Austria also see EPS. Kunavo does not offer PayPal or SEPA direct debit. Stripe displays the amount in euros, with a 2–4% conversion fee built into the exchange rate; this fee is avoided when you pay in US dollars. The balance does not expire and pays only for API usage through Kunavo; it cannot be used to buy a Claude Pro or Max subscription. Payment methods in detail: pay for Claude without a credit card.

Frequently asked questions