What it does

Free Claude Code sits between the official claude CLI and Anthropic’s API, translating requests so you can point Claude Code at NVIDIA NIM, Gemini, DeepSeek, Ollama, or a dozen other providers. It preserves the client experience—streaming, tool use, even the /model picker—while the actual inference happens elsewhere. A local admin UI on 127.0.0.1:8082/admin handles keys and routing rules.

The interesting bit

The proxy doesn’t just swap the base URL; it juggles three different API dialects. Some providers speak Anthropic’s native Messages format (DeepSeek, Kimi, Wafer), others expose OpenAI-compatible endpoints (Gemini, Mistral, Groq), and a few need custom shaping. The project maps Claude’s tiered model names—Opus, Sonnet, Haiku—to different backends independently, so you can, say, run cheap local inference for Haiku and splurge on NVIDIA for Opus.

Key highlights

• 17 provider backends including free tiers (OpenRouter, Gemini, Mistral Experiment) and local options (Ollama, LM Studio, llama.cpp)
• Per-tier routing: MODEL_OPUS, MODEL_SONNET, MODEL_HAIKU can each point to different providers
• Native /model picker integration via a fake /v1/models endpoint (requires Gateway model discovery opt-in)
• Optional Discord/Telegram bot wrappers and VS Code extension support
• Voice-note transcription via local Whisper or NVIDIA NIM
• fcc-claude launcher auto-sets environment variables including a 190k-token auto-compaction window

Caveats

• The README is upfront that “free” depends on the provider’s terms; several free tiers have rate limits or geographic restrictions (Gemini notably warns that prompts may train Google’s models outside the UK/EEA/EU)
• Admin UI is loopback-only, which is sensible but means no remote team sharing of one proxy instance
• Some provider slugs in the docs appear speculative or forward-dated (gemini-3.1-flash-lite, gpt-5.3-codex, claude-sonnet-4)—unclear if these are placeholders, typos, or pre-release names

Verdict

Worth a look if you’re already committed to Claude Code’s UX but not its API bills. Skip it if you want a fully open-source agent stack without Anthropic’s client in the loop at all.