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Claude

Claude Code Costs $100/Month – OpenCode Does the Same Thing for Free

13 min read

In March 2026, Lenny Rachitsky published an article with a telling headline: “Everyone should be using Claude Code”. It went viral on LinkedIn and tech newsletters, picked up hundreds of thousands of views, and now every week a manager somewhere asks: how do I try this?

The answer is uncomfortable. The Anthropic Max subscription that unlocks Claude Code costs $100 per month. That’s $1,200 a year for a single tool – before you’ve even figured out whether it fits your workflow. And it locks you into a single vendor, a single model, and a pricing tier designed for power users, not for someone exploring whether AI agents are worth the investment.

There’s a direct alternative. OpenCode is an open-source project that does exactly the same thing, works with any model (including free ones), and takes 15 minutes to set up.

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Claude Code Costs $100/Month – OpenCode Does the Same Thing for Free
9 Questions for Yourself: Are You Using AI – or Is AI Using You?
11 min

9 Questions for Yourself: Are You Using AI – or Is AI Using You?

Not long ago I was putting together a proposal for a new client. The amount was unusual, the terms – likewise. My gut said: go with X, you know this market. But I decided to “check” with Claude. The model produced a well-reasoned answer with a different number – 15% below my estimate. It sounded convincing. I changed the number.

A week later the client signed without negotiation. And instead of satisfaction, I felt annoyed: what if my original number would have gone through too? I’ll never know – because at the moment of decision I suppressed my own judgment in favor of the algorithm’s “statistically grounded” answer.

This is the very pattern that Anthropic’s researchers call Disempowerment – loss of control. Not dramatic, not obvious. Just a quiet swap of “I decided” for “AI suggested.”

33 AI Models for Managers: Why We Need Your Ratings
11 min

33 AI Models for Managers: Why We Need Your Ratings

Over the past year, 33 new AI models have appeared on the market, each claiming the title of “best manager’s assistant.” ChatGPT updated to GPT-5.2, Claude released Opus 4.5, Gemini added a new Pro version, Yandex and Sber announced further improvements, and Chinese models went OpenSource. How do you choose a tool when every one of them promises a productivity revolution? We decided to run a large-scale comparative study – but ran into a problem that may seem paradoxical.