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niuniu
niuniu

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I Cancelled All 5 of My Paid AI Coding Subscriptions. Here's the Free Stack That Replaced Them.

I ran the numbers last month and nearly fell out of my chair: Copilot ($10), Cursor ($20), Windsurf ($15), ChatGPT Plus ($20), Claude Pro ($20). $85/month — $1,020/year — just to write code with AI. And half the time I was rate-limited anyway.

So I cancelled everything. Here's the exact free stack I use now, with the real numbers.

The stack

Paid tool Cost Free replacement Cost
GitHub Copilot $10/mo Continue.dev + Ollama (Qwen2.5-Coder 7B) $0
Cursor $20/mo VS Code + MonkeyCode $0
ChatGPT Plus $20/mo Hugging Face Inference API (free tier) $0
Claude Pro $20/mo Google Colab free T4 + open models $0
Windsurf $15/mo Tabby (self-hosted) $0
Total $85/mo $0/mo

The setup that matters (10 minutes)

1. Ollama + Qwen2.5-Coder for autocomplete:

curl -fsSL https://ollama.com/install.sh | sh
ollama pull qwen2.5-coder:7b
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Then in VS Code, install the Continue extension and point config.json at it:

{
  "models": [{
    "title": "Qwen Coder (local)",
    "provider": "ollama",
    "model": "qwen2.5-coder:7b"
  }],
  "tabAutocompleteModel": {
    "title": "Autocomplete",
    "provider": "ollama",
    "model": "qwen2.5-coder:1.5b"
  }
}
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2. Colab free T4 for the heavy stuff. Anything that won't fit on my laptop (fine-tuning, 13B+ models) goes to Colab:

from transformers import AutoModelForCausalLM, AutoTokenizer
import torch
tok = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained("Qwen/Qwen2.5-Coder-7B-Instruct")
model = AutoModelForCausalLM.from_pretrained(
    "Qwen/Qwen2.5-Coder-7B-Instruct",
    torch_dtype=torch.float16, device_map="auto"
)  # fits on free T4 (16GB) in fp16
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What actually happened after 30 days

Honest numbers, no hype:

  • Autocomplete acceptance rate: 31% with Copilot → 24% with Qwen2.5-Coder local. Slightly worse. I notice it maybe twice a day.
  • Latency: Local model is faster — 40ms vs 200ms+ round trip. No network, no rate limits, works on planes.
  • Big refactors: This is where I lost real ground. Claude Pro is genuinely better at 500-line refactors. I work around it by breaking refactors into smaller chunks.
  • Privacy: My code never leaves my machine now. That was worth something on its own.

Net savings: $1,020/year. Net productivity loss: I'd estimate 5-8%. For a side-project dev, that's a trade I'll take every single time.

The catch nobody mentions

You need 8GB+ of free RAM/VRAM for the 7B model. On an 8GB laptop, use qwen2.5-coder:3b or 1.5b for autocomplete — still decent. And if you want a managed free option instead of self-hosting, I wrote up the full comparison on my setup page: https://ly.cyberserval.tech/iIETXiF

Paid AI coding tools in 2026 are the new cable TV bundle — you're paying for 5 subscriptions and using 20% of each. Fight me in the comments: is Copilot's 7% better acceptance rate worth $1,000/year to you, or have you found a free setup that actually sticks?

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