Claude Code free trial: 7 days by invite, or 6 free months of Ultra for open source maintainers

Is there a Claude Code free trial?

No, not one you can start yourself. We checked seven routes to free Claude Code on 9 November 2026. Two are closed. One needs a friend who pays for Claude. Two need you to qualify as a maintainer or a teacher. The last two are open to anyone, but each has a catch.

Anthropic's pricing page marks Claude Code "No" in the Free column. Pro costs $20 a month, or $200 for the year, and it's the cheapest plan with Claude Code. Max costs $100 and Ultra $200. None of the three shows a trial. The page has one Trials row, in the Team and Enterprise table, and only sales-assisted Enterprise gets a yes there.

So the Free plan can't run Claude Code at all. It's not a smaller allowance. It's none. A free account needs a paid plan or an API key before Claude Code does any work. Claude Code pricing has every paid plan side by side.

Every route to free Claude Code, checked 9 November 2026

Only the guest pass gives you the real product on a Claude plan for free, and you can't get it without an invite. Every row below comes from Anthropic's own pages, apart from the last one, which comes from Ollama's docs:

Two rows look free and aren't quite. The API credits are a test balance. Anthropic's pricing docs say "New users receive a small amount of free credits to test the API" and don't give the amount. Claude Code bills those credits per token, so a long session can spend them in an afternoon. The local model row is free, but it isn't Claude. More on both below.

How does the Claude Code guest pass work?

A guest pass is a referral link that gives a new user 7 days of Claude Pro, Claude Code included, at no charge. Two Anthropic pages set the rules, and we read both on 9 November 2026. The guest pass help page says passes "are currently available to eligible Pro, Max, and Ultra subscribers only." The Guest Pass Terms, effective 5 November 2026, name "Pro and Max subscribers who have been subscribed for at least 31 days" and don't mention Ultra. Here's how one gets redeemed:

1. Ask someone who has been on Pro or Max for at least 31 days. They'll find their passes with the /passes command in Claude Code, under Claude Code in their Claude settings, or in the Cowork tab of Claude Desktop's settings.
2. Open the link on an account that has never paid for or trialled Claude. The help page says recipients "must be new to Claude paid subscriptions." The terms go further: no one who ever had "a paid subscription to, or free trial of, any Claude product," Team and Enterprise included.
3. Add a card. The help page says you "won't be charged unless they continue using Claude after the end of their seven-day trial."
4. Install Claude Code. The pass covers it from day one, and the signup includes guided installation.
5. Decide before day 7. If you don't cancel, the trial "will automatically convert to a paid Pro plan," which is $20 a month on the web.

Passes are scarce. Anthropic says each sender has "a limited number" and doesn't print the count. When more people click a link than there are passes left, the first to redeem get them. Passes "have no cash value and are non-transferable," and they can expire. Senders may earn overage credits once a guest converts to paid. A friend on Ultra should check their settings before promising you a pass, since the terms leave Ultra out. A friend on the Free plan has none to give. The Claude guest pass guide sets the help page and the terms side by side, rule by rule.

The pass is the same one the Claude Pro free trial guide covers for chat. One link unlocks Claude chat, Claude Code, Cowork and Claude Design together. You can't get a Claude Code-only pass.

Can you use Claude Code for free without a subscription?

Yes, in two ways, and neither lasts. The Claude Code app is free to install. What costs money is the model behind it, and Claude Code accepts two kinds of free model access: Anthropic's API test credits, or an open model you run yourself.

API test credits. Make a Claude Console account, sign Claude Code in with it, and Claude Code bills that balance per token. Anthropic doesn't name the amount. For scale, the sample session in Anthropic's cost docs cost $0.55 on Sonnet 4.6. The same tokens cost about $0.27 on Sonnet 5.5 at today's rates, by our sum. Anthropic's pricing docs add that newer models count "approximately 30% more tokens for the same text," so the same work may cost closer to $0.36. Unless the balance is large, that's a few sessions, not a week of work.

Local models through Ollama. Ollama's Claude Code guide points Claude Code at your own machine with one command, ollama launch claude, or by setting ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL=http://localhost:11434. Its example runs claude --model qwen3.5. The guide asks for a context window of "64k or higher" for larger repositories. That costs nothing per token. But no Claude model answers. You get Claude Code's tools and terminal workflow driven by an open model, and the results depend on that model.

OpenRouter runs the same trick through a hosted gateway. Its Claude Code guide warns that the setup is "only guaranteed to work with the Anthropic first-party provider" and that "Claude Code is optimized for Anthropic models and may not work correctly with other providers." Usage bills to your OpenRouter credits, so this route isn't free when you pick a Claude model.

GitHub Copilot is the other place people look. GitHub's plans page lists Claude models from Haiku 5.5 to Opus 5.5 even on Copilot Free, with "limited chat and agent usage". That's GitHub's agent calling Claude, not the Claude Code terminal app. Copilot's own Claude agent, which GitHub says "uses the Claude Agent SDK", needs a paid plan, and GitHub's pages disagree on which one. The $10 Pro card lists "Access to 3rd party agents (Claude Code and Codex)", while the comparison table on the same page includes them only from Pro+ at $39.

Who gets Claude Code free for months?

Open source maintainers and US K-12 teachers can get Claude Code free for 6 to 12 months, if they qualify. Both programs are Anthropic's own, and both were open on 9 November 2026.

Claude for Open Source now gives "6 months of free Claude Ultra", the $200 plan Anthropic's help center says replaced Max 20x. At list price that's $1,200 of plan. You qualify with any one of five thresholds. The first is 200,000 or more combined monthly downloads, or 500 dependent repos, or 100 dependent packages. The others are committer status on a recognized project, 100 merged pull requests to repos you don't own in the last 12 months, a repo with 20 or more external contributors, and an OpenSSF criticality score of 0.4 or above. The page also says you can "apply anyway" if you're close. When the 6 months end, "your complimentary subscription ends," and a free account goes back to the free plan.

Claude for Teachers, launched on 14 July 2026, gives verified US K-12 educators a free year that "includes Claude Code and Cowork." Teachers who sign up by 30 June 2027 get the full year. Students don't get a matching offer. Anthropic sells no individual student price, so a student gets Claude through a university plan, if the school has one, as the Claude student discount page explains.

What is the cheapest way to try Claude Code without a free trial?

With no pass and no program, one month of Claude Pro at $20 is the cheapest way to try Claude Code on Claude's own models with a flat bill. An API key can cost less for a short test, because you pay only for the sessions you run. Here's what each route costs up front, as of 9 November 2026:

A key suits a weekend test. Set a workspace spend limit in the Console first, then run Claude Code on Sonnet 5.5, which Anthropic's cost docs say "handles most coding tasks well and costs less than Opus." Anthropic's own average is about $13 per developer per active day. Three days of real work could cost more than a month of Pro. The cheapest way to use Claude Code does that sum for every plan.

Whizi, which publishes this page, sells the last row, and it isn't a Claude Code trial. Whizi is a chat app with no Claude Code, no terminal agent and no API. Its Pro intro week gives you Claude Opus 5.5 and Claude Sonnet 5.5 next to GPT and Gemini, which tests the models on code you paste in. It won't edit your repository. If the agent is what you want to try, a guest pass or one month of Pro is the honest answer.