Freebuff vs Augment Code: a full free day vs no free plan and a 40% fee

Augment Code made its name with a context engine that understands large codebases. But there is no free way to use it, every model call carries a 40% fee, and the pricing has been rebuilt again and again since 2025. If you want a coding agent you can use every day without a bill, Freebuff is the better choice.

At a glance

What Augment Code costs

Per Augment’s pricing page, Standard is $20 a month with "$20 of usage included every month", and Business is $100 a month with $100 of usage. Usage is measured in dollars: model calls at the provider’s list price, "a flat 40% fee on LLM usage", and compute time for its Cosmos cloud agents, which its docs put at $0.19 an hour. Run past your plan and you "top up as you go".

There is no free plan on that page. In May 2025 Augment called its old Community plan "the most generous free AI agent plan on the market right now". In October 2025 it moved to credits, saying "This change will increase costs for some Augment Code users". By mid-2026 the credit plans were gone too, replaced by today’s dollar plans.

What Freebuff gives you for free

• Unlimited messages in every session. A session lasts an hour, and the agent can read, edit, test and retry as many times as it needs inside it, with no fee on each call.
• A published daily allowance with no monthly cap. Up to 30 hours a day in the US, and 21 in countries such as Canada, the UK and Germany. That is 10 hours a day of DeepSeek V4.1 Flash, refilled every day.
• Models that do not use it. Right now, Solar Mini 4 and Solar Pro 4 never touch your allowance, and new accounts in the US and other top-tier countries also get DeepSeek V4.1 Flash Fast without touching it.
• Everywhere you work. The CLI, a desktop app for Mac, Windows and Linux, the web workspace, and apps for iOS and Android.

What Augment Code users are saying

• "10x worse". When credits arrived in October 2025, The Register’s headline was that users said the new model was "10x worse". One user counted "31 messages, corresponding to 40,982 credits under the new pricing model", and left: "I’m out. It was good while it lasted."
• A broken promise. On Hacker News, a user wrote that Augment had promised to grandfather the legacy $30 plan, and instead it was "giving it a bit less than 60% as many credits".
• A month gone in a day. In February 2026, a user filed an issue titled "Predatory credit pricing": 17 queries with the Auggie CLI "Burned 37,016 credits (92.5% of 40,000 monthly Indie Plan allowance)". Trying to report it with Augment’s own agent, they "ran out of credit, of course. In one day."
• Features taken away. In March 2026, Augment switched off Next Edit and Completions in its IDE extensions for everyone outside Enterprise.
• A new owner. In October 2026, Augment announced that Cosmos, the Auggie CLI and its Context Engine are "joining Harness". Its pricing page now carries Harness’s copyright.
• A security gap. In July 2026, Wiz Research reported that Augment "was vulnerable to both symlink-following reads and writes", one of six assistants it tested.

What Freebuff users are saying

Where Augment Code is strong

Augment’s Context Engine is genuinely good at large codebases, its model list is wide, and it publishes exactly how it bills: list price, a stated 40% fee, and compute. Plans cover up to 50 seats with no per-seat charge, paid plans exclude training on your data, and it holds SOC 2 Type II. For a team that wants all of that and has the budget, it is a serious tool.

Our verdict

Pick Freebuff. Augment Code has no free plan, charges a 40% fee on every model call, and has changed what you get for your money again and again. Freebuff gives you unlimited messages in every session and a published allowance that refills every day, with no card and no fee.