The Free Claude Code Routes — Every $0 Route Ranked and Tested on One Mac, Plus the One-Sentence Ban Line
The companion to the video. Claude Code costs about $240 a year — so we ran the SAME broken repo (2 planted bugs, 4 unit tests) through every route people claim is free, on one MacBook Pro M4 Pro, with saved transcripts. THIS SHEET: (1) THE RANKED TABLE — all 6 routes worst to best, with what is ACTUALLY free vs trial, our real test result, and a risk rating for each. (2) THE EXACT COMMANDS — copy-paste setup for the winner that fixed our repo in 20.7 seconds at $0, the side-door route that puts free open models inside the real Claude Code UI (33s, cost header $0.0000000000), and the free-forever local route (21.6s, works on a plane). (3) THE BAN LINE — the one-sentence rule verified in both directions: gateway-to-open-models is unsupported-not-banned, but subscription OAuth inside any third-party tool IS banned, with receipts of accounts banned within about a minute. (4) THE $100 CREDITS TRIPWIRE — the two hard dates (claim by Aug 2, gone Sep 17) and the auto-reload setting to turn OFF before claiming so free credits never roll into surprise paid billing. (5) THE 273K-VIEW FACT-CHECK — the viral 'free coding agent' whose famous numbers turn out to be startup latency, not coding ability, and which went 0/3 on our bugfix. All tested claims from real runs on July 30, 2026; the one docs-only route is labeled NOT TESTED. Independent sheet from Hyperautomation Labs — not affiliated with any tool vendor.
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