How much does it actually cost to give someone free AI coding?
One thing we've been trying to understand with Clixad is where the economics of a “free” AI coding tool actually start to break.
Every coding agent uses paid inference. Give someone enough turns and the cost adds up pretty quickly.
Clixad is experimenting with a different model.
Users don't need their own API key or a required monthly subscription. They get free credits, and can earn more through advertiser-funded offers, forms and surveys.
We recently also made our five cheapest models free to use within daily limits, so users can try AI coding without immediately spending credits.
The tradeoff is pretty straightforward: the user gets access without paying directly, while advertisers help cover part of the inference cost.
We're still learning where the balance works best. Free models, free credits, advertiser revenue and actual usage all have to line up for the model to make sense.
That's probably one of the more interesting parts of building Clixad right now.
For founders building AI products, how are you thinking about inference costs when your users aren't paying directly?
The place where ad-supported coding breaks isn't the free tier, it's the debug loop.
Ad revenue per completion is bounded (pennies to low single digits depending on the geography and advertiser). A coding task is unbounded: one recursive context reload or three test-fix cycles and the inference cost on that single session just wiped out twenty survey completions. So the subsidy model works for "generate a boilerplate function", but the moment someone tries to build real software with it, your unit economics invert.
That's the arithmetic that pushed me away from ads or credits and into a flat subscription. Disclosure: I'm the founder of Piramyd, a flat $30/mo gateway with unlimited tokens for Claude Code, Codex, Cursor and others. We pool the variance across power users and casual users instead of trying to make every single session pay for itself.
On your question about how to think about inference when users aren't paying directly: the only model I've seen survive is hard-bounding the context window per turn. If a user can drag a 100k-token repo into a free turn, no survey on earth covers that call.