Freebuff vs Kilo Code: free all day vs a token bill that loops can run up

Kilo Code is an open-source coding agent for VS Code, JetBrains and the terminal, and it gives you more than 500 models at the provider’s own price. That is a fair deal if you want to pay per token. But it means every retry, loop and long context lands on your bill. If you want a coding agent you can use all day without one, Freebuff is the better choice.

At a glance

What Kilo Code costs

Per Kilo’s pricing, the extension is free and "Usage is billed separately". You either buy Kilo credits, charged at the upstream provider’s rate with no markup, bring your own API keys, or subscribe to Kilo Pass from $19 a month for bonus credits.

Kilo does offer free models, and its Auto Free mode routes you to whichever are available, but they are "rate-limited by IP address" at 200 requests an hour, and the lineup changes: Kilo’s own blog has covered a popular free model going paid. For the models most people want, you pay per token.

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. A loop costs you nothing, because there is no token bill.
• 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.
• No API key, no setup. Install the CLI and sign in. There is also a desktop app for Mac, Windows and Linux, the web workspace, and apps for iOS and Android.

What Kilo Code users are saying

Kilo’s Trustpilot page scores 2.4 out of 5 from 19 reviews, 63% of them one star, and its GitHub issues show where the money goes:

• Loops that run until stopped. An August 2026 issue on compaction says "Model usage/tokens continue increasing until manually stopped." #13317 An earlier one reports an agent "generating 8.5 million tokens and wasting $7.59 in credits" on a simple code review question. #3767
• Credits eaten. In April 2026, a user reported two simple tasks that first showed under a dollar each, then changed to $10 and $9, draining their OpenRouter balance. #9743
• Billing surprises. An open September issue says a model labelled OpenRouter was billed through Kilo’s gateway instead, returning a payment error. #13894 A March 2026 reviewer was "automatically charged $19.00 for a renewal I did not authorize or want".
• No reply on a payment problem. In October 2026, a user of almost a year said a failed card payment took $20 four times without adding credits, and "I haven’t received any response so far."
• Unreliable. "going round in circles and messing up code that worked before" (August 2026), and "you can’t reliably get work done with Kilo Code" (April 2026).
• A data exposure. In August 2026, a breach at Kilo’s analytics vendor exposed names, emails and "partial or full prompts" for some Kilo users.

What Freebuff users are saying

Where Kilo Code is strong

Kilo Code is MIT-licensed, runs in VS Code, JetBrains, the terminal and the cloud, offers 500+ models at the provider’s price with no markup, supports your own keys, and has a safeguard that pauses the agent when it repeats a failing action. If you want to pay per token for a specific model, it is an honest way to do it.

Our verdict

Pick Freebuff. Kilo Code is free to install, but real work is billed per token, and a loop or a long context runs up the bill. Freebuff gives you unlimited messages in every session and a published allowance that refills every day, with no API key and no token bill.