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