Claude Code is now FREE: Here’s how…

**Julian Goldie** (0:00)
Today, I'm going to show you how to use Claude Code free forever with a brand new update that just came out from Google that allows you to use free Claude Code with a free local model. And then also it's 90% faster, which is usually the main downfall of local models. So I'm going to run you through exactly how we're running this system right here, what you can build with it, how it works, et cetera. You can see a bunch of things that we've built with it over here. So we've already plugged this into our agent operating system. And this works in three simple steps. So first of all, the update and why this is important. So Gemma 4 from Google is now 90% faster on Apple Silicon with Ollama using MLX. Big speed up. That means essentially that you can run free local models, but they're also going to run faster and better than they ever did before if you're using Gemma 4, right? Now, if you're wondering, okay, how do you use that? And how do you plug it into free Claude Code? So, it's pretty simple. You're going to get Ollama, which is free to download, and then you're going to use it with Gemma 4, which is also free to download, and then you're going to install it into Claude Code, which literally takes one click. So you download Ollama, that is free. You download Gemma 4, that is free. You run it with Claude Code, and guess what? That's also free. And so you've got the power of an agent harness like free Claude Code, but you're using it with a free local model that can run autonomously for you 24 seven, if you'd like. And if you want to see a demo of this working in action, so we can go to our agent factory over here. You can see it's running with Gemma 4
We can preview everything that we'll build over here. So it's created some pretty nice things, as you can see. And then also over here, we can ask it to build something. So if we're like, okay, just simple, like, okay, create a to-do list app. We can hit build, and then it's good to go on that as well. We can also use it inside the workspace here. So if we go inside the chat, we can say, okay, build up a Space Invaders game. It's going to use free Claude Code to build that out. And then it's just going to work in the background and start coding, as you can see.
So you can use free local models. You can also use this with Hermes agent. I tested it.
The thing to note with Hermes is like, it still uses a lot of tools, which means that Gemma 4 is going to be quite slow with that. But at the same time, if you're just running tasks in the background or they're running on schedule, you actually don't need it to be fast because it's running in the background and then you come back to it when you're ready and that would be in like two or three hours. So that's another way to use this update as well. And the way that we're using it with free Claude Code, it actually allows you to run this with an API too. So if you don't have a Mac, if you don't have MLX, if you don't have Apple Silicon, no problem, you can still do all of this for free. The way that you would do that is you're gonna go to OpenRouter over here, and then inside OpenRouter, just type in free and you will see Gemma 4 available for free. And so you can take that API from OpenRouter, you can get free API key, the free API for Gemma 4, and then you would get the open source project free Claude Code. We've already plugged it into the Agent Operate System if you want to get it set up for me, but that's basically how you can use it. So you can get free Claude Code, and then you can open router through that and use Agent Harness with Claude Code, which is pretty insane in itself.
So either way, whether you have, if you have a Mac and you have Apple Silicon, you can use Gemma 4 locally. If you don't have a Mac, you can use Gemma 4, but you use a free API and plug that into Claude Code instead. That's how this works. So whilst we're waiting for that to run in the background, one thing that I'd note with these models is that basically, when you're using them, it's pretty useful, but you wouldn't try and go for something super complicated here. So if you're using the Agent OS with free Claude Code, or if you're, for example, trying to build something complicated with free Claude Code, then you would use a frontier model. And if you're looking for a cheap version of that, you could use something like GLN 5.2. But if it was something basic like writing a blog post, using it agentically, if it was, for example, creating a landing page, well then you could use Gemma 4 and it would actually be pretty good.