Cline has been the go-to answer for "the best free AI coding agent" for months — install the VS Code extension, bring your own API key, pay your LLM provider directly, nothing else. That's still mostly true. But it's no longer the whole story, and our own pricing page hadn't caught up.
Since June 29, 2026, Cline has sold ClinePass: $9.99/month ($4.99 for the first month), a flat-rate subscription for discounted access to open-weight models — GLM 5.2, Kimi K2.7 Code, DeepSeek V4 Pro, MiniMax-M3, Qwen3.7 — at 2-5x cheaper usage than paying those providers directly. It's not a toggle buried in a settings menu either: it's surfaced app-wide now (account page, provider settings, a home-screen banner), and ClinePass-billed tasks are excluded from Cline's cost-estimate display the same way Claude Code and Codex subscription billing already are. That's product-team language for "this is a real tier," not a promo.
We verified this directly against Cline's own GitHub release notes (v4.1.17, Sept 2) rather than trusting aggregator writeups, since cline.bot and docs.cline.bot were unreachable from our tooling when we checked. The release notes confirm the app-wide surfacing and the billing treatment; the launch date and price come from Cline's own X account and blog coverage.
What this changes: Cline is still free-and-open-source at its core, and BYOK still works exactly as before if you want it to. But "is Cline actually free?" now has a real second answer for anyone comparing it to Copilot, Cursor, or Tabnine on price — a $9.99/mo flat tier sitting alongside the pay-per-token model, not replacing it.
We're correcting our Cline pricing page to reflect this. If you read it before today, the "Free and open source, one plan" framing was accurate when written (March 2026) and is now incomplete.
No affiliate relationship with Cline — this is a straight correction, not a pitch.
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