Show IH: I'm building a free AI coding agent for the terminal (no $20/mo subscription)

Hey everyone.

I got tired of the subscription fatigue in the dev tool space. It feels like every new AI coding assistant wants $20 to $100 a month. I just wanted access to good models in my terminal without a recurring tax.

So I started building Clixad (clixad.io). It is a free AI coding agent that runs directly in your terminal. You point it at your project, and it reads your files, writes code, and runs commands like your test suite. It always shows a diff and asks for permission before it changes anything.

The part that might interest this community is the business model. I didn't want to build another SaaS. Clixad gives you access to premium models like Claude Opus 5, Claude Sonnet 5, GPT-5.2, and Kimi K2, but you pay for API usage with your time instead of your credit card.

Here is how it works: you use credits to pay the AI. When your wallet runs out, you top up by taking a 5-minute survey or filling out a form from an advertiser. A quick 2-minute form gets you around 128 coding turns on a fast model like Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite. The advertiser pays for the completion, that money funds your API usage, and I take a small cut to keep the lights on.

Privacy was a big priority for me here. The ad offers live in a web page in your browser, entirely separate from the terminal agent. Your code, your prompts, and your project names are never sent to advertisers.

Clixad is now live. You can try it out at clixad.io and start vibecoding for free. Users can earn credits by completing offers, so there’s no subscription or upfront cost.

I'd really appreciate some honest feedback from other builders.

Does this "time for API credits" model appeal to you as a dev?

Are there specific terminal workflows you'd want this agent to handle first?

Thanks for reading.