I tried a Claude Code alternative that's local, open source, and completely free - how it works

I was curious if Block's Goose agent, paired with Ollama and the Qwen3-coder model, could really replace Claude Code. Here's how I got started.

Claude Code costs up to $200 a month. Goose does the same thing for free.

Goose, Block’s open-source AI coding agent, is emerging as a free alternative to Anthropic’s Claude Code, as developers weigh offline control, rate limits, and the rising cost of AI coding tools.