opencode v2.x Free Tier Dries Up After One Conversation: A Metering Change Breaks the Daily Quota
Developers who relied on opencode's free tier for daily AI coding tasks will find their quota drained after a single conversation, forcing a move to BYOK or paid plans. The rolling-budget metering and fat-session problem reveal the real cost of agent-style workflows, a cost that other free-tier AI tools will likely face.
opencode's v2.x release has turned the free tier from a workable resource into a one-hour stopgap. Users report that a single conversation can exhaust the entire daily free quota, and the issues tracker for anomalyco/opencode is overflowing with complaints. The trigger is a change in how the quota is metered: instead of a simple daily per-request count, v2 uses a rolling budget that deducts based on token consumption and request characteristics.
An issue #58751 reporter pulled their local sqlite database and found that an old session with 447k tokens of assembled context returned provider.free-limit on every build, while a fresh 23k-token session succeeded seconds later. That points to a rolling bucket at its boundary, not a hard cap. Meanwhile, v2 agents read more files, carry fuller LSP context, and rely on auto-compaction, so a single build request can assemble hundreds of thousands of tokens. Even automatic title generation calls hit the free pool, with one log showing the main model at 'Free usage limit reached' while the title model reported 'Insufficient account funds' within the same second.
Two rounds with DeepSeek v4.1 flash after upgrading to 2.2.5 used up the quota. The maintainers haven't fixed it yet, and free-tier models are now either rate-limited or degraded, pushing developers toward BYOK for stable work.
The switch to a rolling token budget rather than a daily counter is a service-side decision that matches real processing costs, but it breaks the assumption that a free tier resets predictably every day.
Agentic workflows generate many hidden small model calls beyond the main prompt; title generation alone can tip a session over the free limit, making quota exhaustion seem sudden and arbitrary.
The backlash in GitHub issues suggests opencode underestimated how much heavy users rely on the free tier, and the current throttling may push them to BYOK or rivals.