#cloud ide

Last Updated: November 21, 2025 Verified Status: ✅ All 100+ tools checked for active free tiers.

Let's be real: paying $20/month for every AI tool is unsustainable. You need a coding assistant, a debugger, a web builder, and a data agent. That adds up to $100/month fast.

But here's the secret the SaaS companies don't want you to know: You can get a production-grade AI coding stack for $0.

I have spent the last week testing, verifying, and ranking over 100 AI coding agents and platforms. These aren't just "free trials" that ask for a credit card and charge you after 7 days. These are tools with generous, perpetual free tiers, open-source models, or cloud-based credits that you can rotate for practically unlimited usage.

Whether you're a student, an indie hacker, or just frugal, this is your new bible for free AI coding.

🏆 The "God Tier" (Must-Haves)

If you only use five tools from this list, make it these. They offer the highest value, the best models (Gemini 3 Pro, Claude 3.5, GPT-4o), and the most generous limits.

1. Google Antigravity (Preview)

The New King of Free. Google's latest agentic IDE is currently in a massive public preview. It gives you access to Gemini 3 Pro, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, and GPT-OSS models completely for free.

Free Tier: Unlimited usage during preview, with rate limits that refresh every ~5 hours.

Why it wins: It's a full cloud IDE that runs on Google's infrastructure. No local GPU needed.

Best For: Full-stack development, complex refactoring.

2. Amazon Kiro

The "Hidden Gem" Cloud IDE. Amazon's answer to Cursor, but fully cloud-native. Kiro offers a surprisingly generous free tier that renews monthly.

Free Tier: 50 credits/month (enough for ~2 weeks of heavy use).

Bonus: New accounts often get a 30-day trial with 500 bonus credits.

Best For: AWS integrations, Python/Node.js projects.

3. Bolt.new

The Best Web Builder. Bolt allows you to prompt an entire full-stack app into existence in the browser.

Free Tier: ~150k-300k daily tokens (resets daily/monthly).

Strategy: Great for scaffolding. Once you hit the limit, export the code to a free IDE like Project IDX.

Best For: React/Next.js prototypes, landing pages.

4. Firebase Studio (formerly Project IDX)

The "VS Code in the Cloud" Workhorse. Google has rebranded Project IDX to Firebase Studio (April 2025). It remains a fully functional, cloud-based VS Code environment integrated with Gemini.

Free Tier: Free core usage. Up to 5 workspaces.

Why it wins: It's basically a high-power Linux machine in your browser with AI baked in.

Best For: Flutter, Angular, and Next.js development.

5. Windsurf (formerly Codeium)

The Best Copilot Alternative. Codeium has rebranded its IDE to Windsurf, while keeping the "Codeium" name for its extensions.

Free Tier: Unlimited autocomplete and free chat (Llama 3.1 70B).

Why it wins: It's fast, accurate, and doesn't artificially limit you to push you to a paid plan.

Best For: VS Code extension, local development.

🐉 The Chinese Titans (New & Powerful)

China's tech giants are releasing massive, free AI models to compete with OpenAI. These are often completely free or have huge limits.

Tool Provider Free Tier Limits Key Features Tongyi Lingma Alibaba Free Basic Edition Integrated into VS Code. huge context window. Comate Baidu Free Trial / Quota Great for Python/C++. 500 agent dialogues/month. MarsCode (Trae) ByteDance Free Beta Extremely fast. "Trae" is the new IDE name. DeepSeek Coder DeepSeek Open Source Use via OpenRouter or locally. The "GPT-4 Killer". Cloud Studio Tencent 1000 Points/Month Cloud IDE similar to IDX. Spark Desk iFlytek Free "Lite" Tier Good for Chinese/English translation & coding. GLM-4 Zhipu AI Free API (Flash) "GLM-4-Flash" is free via API. Kimi Moonshot Free Web/App Excellent long-context handling (200k+ tokens).

☁️ Big Tech & Cloud Titans

These companies have deep pockets and are subsidizing your AI usage to win market share. Take advantage of it.

Google AI Studio: Free access to Gemini 1.5 Pro/Flash APIs.

GitHub Copilot: Free for Students & Open Source maintainers.

Amazon Q Developer: 50 agentic requests/month + 1000 lines of code transformation.

Google Cloud Shell: Includes Gemini Code Assist (50 hours/week).

Google Colab: Free T4 GPUs (12-hour sessions).

Kaggle Kernels: 30 hours/week of GPU time.

Lightning AI: 80 GPU hours/month.

Meta Code Llama: Free via Hugging Face / Perplexity.

Grok (xAI): Free credits for developers (beta programs).

🛠️ The "Install In" Collection (Extensions & CLIs)

These tools plug into your existing workflow (VS Code, Terminal, etc.).

VS Code Extensions

Cline: (formerly Claude Dev) Open source, BYOK.

Roo Code: (formerly Ruccord?) Fork of Cline, supports Grok.

Kilocode: Free extension with "Horizon Beta" models.

CodeGPT: Connect any LLM to VS Code.

Continue: Open-source autopilot.

Blackbox AI: Generous free chat.

Bito AI: 20 requests/day.

CodeGeex: Free multilingual coding assistant.

AskCodi: 50 credits/month.

Refact.ai: 2000 free "coins"/month.

CodeMate: Basic free tier.

Machinet: 20 free unit tests.

Adrenaline: 5 boosted answers/day.

Grit.io: Free for migrations.

Ellipsis: Free for public repos.

Mentat: Open source (BYOK).

CodeRabbit: Free for Open Source.

Sweep AI: Free for Open Source.

CodiumAI (Qodo): Free test generation.

Mintlify: Free "Hobby" tier for docs.

Pieces: Local snippet manager.

Tabby: Self-hosted (Free).

Twinny: Local AI (Free).

Sourcery: Free for public repos.

CLIs & Terminals

Warp: 100 free AI requests/month.

Wave Terminal: Open source, AI-native.

Gemini CLI: Free usage (1000 requests/day with personal account).

Copilot CLI: Included with Copilot.

GPT Engineer: CLI tool (BYOK).

Aider: AI pair programmer in terminal (BYOK).

OpenCode: Free interpreter.

Shell GPT: Command line productivity.

Gorilla CLI: API for CLI commands.

Butterfish: Shell wrapper for LLMs.

🌐 Web Builders & Generators

Lovable: 5 daily credits.

V0.dev: Vercel's UI generator (Monthly credits).

Cosmic: Headless CMS with AI.

Glitch: Free Node.js hosting.

StackBlitz: Free for public repos.

CodeSandbox: Free VM credits.

Replit: (Caution: Free tier is restrictive).

Playcode: Javascript playground.

JSFiddle: Basic AI features.

Codepen: AI features in pro (some free trials).

📊 Data Science & Notebook Agents

DeepNote: Free for individuals.

Hex: 100 "Magic" actions/month.

Jupyter AI: Open source extension.

Deno Jupyter: Free kernel.

Anaconda Assistant: Free in cloud notebooks.

DataCamp Workspace: Free AI assistant.

Julius AI: Free trial messages.

Einblick: Free tier for analysis.

Akkio: Free trial.

🚀 Next-Gen IDEs ("Cursor Killers")

Cursor: The OG. Free tier is decent but limits "fast" requests.

Zed: High-performance, AI-integrated (Free tier available).

Augment Code: Free tier (3000 messages/month).

PearAI: Open source fork of VS Code.

Trae: ByteDance's super-fast IDE.

Void: Open source Cursor alternative.

Melty: Open source AI code editor.

Lapce: Rust-based, fast.

Lite XL: Lightweight.

Pulsar: Hackable editor.

🧩 Specialized & Emerging

Phind: Dev search (Unlimited standard).

Perplexity: Dev search (Free tier).

Fine.dev: Agents for devs.

Second.dev: Migrations.

Factory: Droid factories for code.

Emdash: AI for docs.

Amp: Next-gen editor.

Crush: AI IDE.

BoltAI: Native Mac client.

Rovo Dev: Atlassian's AI.

Zencoder: Code compression.

Tabnine: AI autocomplete (Free Basic).

Sourcegraph Cody: AI coding assistant (Free tier).

Codeium (Extension): The standalone extension.

Diffblue Cover: Java unit test generator (Free Community Edition).

Codiga: Static analysis & snippets (Free tier).

🔄 The "Infinite Free" Rotation Strategy

How do you code for free forever without hitting limits? Use this rotation:

Start with Google Antigravity or Firebase Studio for your main development environment.

Use Bolt.new or Lovable to scaffold your initial UI.

Hit a limit? Export the code to Windsurf or VS Code (with Cline).

Need an API Key? Use Google AI Studio or Groq to get free keys for Cline/Roo.

Need a GPU? Switch to Colab or Kaggle.

Need a second opinion? Paste the error into Phind or Perplexity.

Try Chinese Agents: Use Tongyi Lingma or Trae for a fresh perspective and huge context windows.

Codeanywhere adventures – Getting started with browser based development in containers (part 1)

Are you prepared for some wonderful, quick to use, developer tooling that demands not a one tooling installation and no configuration? That’s what the workforce at Codeanywhere are promising us with their cloud IDE when I stumbled on their web-site last 7 days. They “…don’t need you to have interaction in complicated installations and configuration setups. Simply accessibility our in-browser IDE…

10 Best Cloud IDEs And Free Online Code Editors 2019

Hello friends how are you. Hope everyone is well. We use different types of editors in our daily lives. The best cloud IEDs and online code editors are similar editors that we use. The difference between code editor installed on any other online code editor is that you can coding anytime through online code editor, so it will not be difficult to download and install your software.

It is very easy…

Sundar is right... why do I need a new $1,500 Macbook ~ a $150 Chromebook will do fine for cloud based dev.

If I do my dev in the cloud instead of programming locally then moving it from a Macbook to the cloud with command line tools. 

It’s a cheery time of year. And this month’s Codenvy release brings you all sorts of cheerful features. We are revealing a new invitation wizard, expanded AppFog language support, Surefire Reports, and performance improvements. All go well with your holiday Eggnog. More Coders: Code with Others With the holiday season coming up, this is the perfect time to gather fellow developers around an interesting project and code joyously in the cloud! Our new invitation wizard let’s you easily invite Google contacts and GitHub collaborators to access your workspace and collaborate on projects.

More Languages: AppFog Enhancements We have added support for AppFog PHP and Python projects to go with our Java deliciousness released in November. The folks at AppFog did a nice write up of the integration - check it out. Thanks for the great words, guys!  Better Testing: Surefire Reports Failure is always an option. Especially when you write tests. If your Maven build fails because it didn’t pass the unit tests, you can view the Maven Surefire Test Report with a single click!

We are excited to make a number of announcements designed to benefit our users, partners, and now, investors!

Exo IDE Becomes Codenvy and Raises $9M in Capital

First, Exo IDE has been spun off into its own company, called Codenvy. All of our communications will be under this name moving forward. We have 35 employees, with almost everyone working on R&D, QA, support, PM, or operations. This means that there is a lot of effort invested into making you more productive as developers and delivering new forms of opportunity for our partners. We believe that all development is moving from the desktop to the cloud, and Codenvy is going to lead the charge.

We’d like to wish our friends and colleagues from Exo Platform, our sister company from where we came, good luck and wonderful tidings as we each forge new paths as companies.

Second, today, Codenvy announced that we have brought on our first investors! We have raised $9M in capital from VCs and angels, with the round led by Toba Capital and Auriga Ventures. You can read more about our announcement via the press release. We view this investment as a bridge of support, giving us the resources to build not just a cloud environment, but a complete cloud platform covering the range of code, build, and test scenarios in the cloud. We will use the funds to continue investing in our SAAS offering, build an on-premise installable version (Codenvy Enterprise), and expand our partner reach across the ecosystem of PAAS, code management, agile tool, and continuous integration providers.

Codenvy Website Relaunch

Third, we have launched a new Web site at http://codenvy.com. With this site, we have also unveiled details about Codenvy ISV, our offerings for software companies seeking to create new revenue opportunities, and Codenvy Enterprise, our on-premise offering. Also, you can get a first look at ourpricing model for new services that will launch in the 2nd half of the year.

New Features in Our February Release

Finally, we have shipped our February release. Below are the new capabilities that we have been building:

Faster Access: Single Sign-On. You're always signed-in unless you sign out.

Better productivity: Java Class & Method Refactoring. We've been incorporating an abstract syntax tree (AST) for various languages, starting with Java. Having an AST lets us manipulate the logical structure of the project space and deliver super charged productivity features such as refactoring.

More PaaS: Java Support for OpenShift. Based upon requests from our customers, we have expanded OpenShift to add in the range of Java projects.

Even More PaaS: CloudBees Account Provisioning. Create a CloudBees account and deploy your app without leaving the Codenvy editor.

I want to take this moment to thank our 50,000 developer users. It's your creativity and passion for development that inspires us to continue with such energy. We look forward to working with you in the years to come.

Tyler Jewell CEO @ Codenvy

Follow us on Facebook and Twitter for the latest news: Facebook / @CodenvyHQ

Some of you might already know about Cloud9 and/or their IDE, what you might not also know is it's available as the successor to Skywriter, Bespin--

Along with being integrated on GitHub you can use Ace Editor nearly anywhere, here's the skinny on it's current features:

Syntax highlighting   

Auto indentation and outdent

An optional command line

Work with huge documents (100,000 lines and more are no problem)

Fully customizable key bindings including VI and Emacs modes

Themes (TextMate themes can be imported)

Search and replace with regular expressions

Highlight matching parentheses

Toggle between soft tabs and real tabs

Displays hidden characters