DeepAI Theos vs Freebuff hours: how far does free actually go?

"Free" means very different things depending on how a product counts usage. DeepAI Code and Freebuff are both free coding agents paid for by ads, but one counts requests and tokens, and the other counts hours. For a coding agent, which spends its time reading files, running tests and trying again, that difference decides how far your free day goes.

How Theos work in DeepAI Code

According to DeepAI’s product page, Theos are a daily allowance for DeepAI Code’s frontier models. Each request spends Theos for the tokens it uses. A free account gets up to 200 Theos a day, and DeepAI Pro ($9.99 a month or $89.99 a year) adds 200 more. The balance refreshes 24 hours after it was last granted, and unused Theos do not carry over.

DeepAI publishes a typical cost per request for each model and notes that longer tasks use more. Divide the daily allowance by those typical costs and you get this:

• GLM 5.3 or Kimi K3 (~3 Theos): about 66 requests a day free, 133 with Pro.
• Muse Spark 1.3 (~6 Theos): about 33 free, 66 with Pro.
• GPT-6.1 Sol or Gemini 4 Argon (~10 Theos): about 20 free, 40 with Pro.
• Claude Opus 5.5 or Muse Wonder (~15 Theos): about 13 free, 26 with Pro.
• Claude Fable 5.1 (~25 Theos): about 8 free, 16 with Pro.
• GPT-6 Astra (~50 Theos): about 4 free, 8 with Pro.

These are typical requests: a big refactor, a long test-fix loop or a large codebase in context will cost more per request, so the real number is often lower.

How Freebuff hours work

Freebuff measures your balance in hours. A session lasts an hour, with unlimited messages inside it, so it costs the same whether the agent makes five model calls or five hundred. Each model shows a multiplier: an hour on a 3x model uses three hours of allowance.

What a free account gets each day depends on where you are:

• United States: up to 30 hours a day.
• Canada, the UK, Germany, Switzerland, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, the Nordic countries, the Netherlands, Austria and Luxembourg: 21 hours.
• France, Spain, Italy, Portugal, Belgium, Liechtenstein, Malta and South Korea: 12 hours.
• Everywhere else (limited mode): 5 hours, or 4 over a VPN.

Daily hours refill at midnight in your timezone and do not roll over. New accounts in the US and the second group of countries start on DeepSeek V4.1 Flash, which does not draw down hours at all. If you want more, paid plans start at $8 a month and raise the daily allowance to 50 hours or more.

A real coding afternoon, both ways

Say you spend three hours fixing bugs and adding a feature. You send the agent around 30 prompts, and each one triggers several rounds of reading files, editing and running tests.

• DeepAI Code on Claude Opus 5.5: at ~15 Theos a request, the free allowance covers about 13 of those 30 prompts, fewer if the tasks are big. The rest of the afternoon runs on the unmetered models.
• Freebuff on DeepSeek V4.1 Flash (3x) in the US: three hour-long sessions use 9 of your 30 daily hours. All 30 prompts are covered, however many tool calls each one makes. A new account on DeepSeek V4.1 Flash uses none.

The trade-off is real. DeepAI lets a free account touch Claude Opus 5.5, Claude Fable 5.1 or GPT-6.1 Sol a few times a day, which Freebuff’s free tier does not. Freebuff gives you a long, predictable working day on fast models, and its allowance is much smaller outside the full-access countries.

Why time-based metering suits coding agents

• You can predict it. An hour is an hour. You never have to guess how many tokens a task will burn before you start it.
• It does not punish iteration. Agents get better results by checking their work: running the tests, reading the error, trying again. Per-token pricing makes every retry cost more. An hour-long session does not.
• Big repos cost the same. Pulling a lot of context into a request is what makes token-metered requests expensive. Inside a Freebuff session, it does not change the price.