While you can spend endless money on AI coding tools, I’m known for being a money-saver (I even secured the sparzauberer.de domain, which is translatable to savings wizard).

I have my GitHub Copilot Pro subscription for free using the GitHub Education Pack, which I have because I subscribed to a cheap course at a German distance university (whether I will complete that course is another discussion). That gives me 300 “premium” requests per month, which I can spend for 300 messages to Codex or 100 messages to Opus.

A free alternative seems to be Amp(code.com) by Sourcegraph. Every day you get ten dollars worths of AI credits for free. You just have to live with a little ad snippet wherever you use Ampcode. After using all your credits you can pay for more, or you just wait or use another tool.

I use Ampcode in Visual Studio Code and the ad looks like this:

That’s ok for me, not too annoying.

Update: Just one day after my post, Amp posts that “Amp Free is full (for now)”. So if you haven’t already registered before, you need to continue your search for free AI coding credits.