Free is a funding model, not a technical one. Ask what it's actually paying for.
TL;DR
"Free" is a business-model decision, not a technical guarantee.
Isolation — real hardware-level sandboxing — is the most expensive, least visible thing to get right, and the easiest to cut on a free tier.
rigless is priced plainly: $10-$99/mo by concurrency, 7-day trial, BYO model keys.
Price alone isn't disqualifying for a free tool — but "free" isn't evidence it's safe either.
A newer category of coding agent, led by products like Freebuff, pitches itself explicitly against subscription pricing: run your agent for $0/month instead of paying Claude Code, Devin, or Cursor. That's an appealing pitch — price clearly matters, or it wouldn't work. But "free" is a business model decision, not a technical one, and it's worth asking a few questions before handing a free tool your codebase.
Running an agentic coding tool costs real compute. Running it well — with real sandboxing, real isolation, real infrastructure — costs more than a chat interface. When a product is free, that cost is covered somewhere: venture funding subsidizing growth, an upsell once you're dependent on the free tier, reselling model access, or cutting corners on expensive, invisible parts of the product like isolation. None of those are automatically disqualifying, but "free" alone doesn't tell you which one you're getting.
The hardest, least visible part of running a coding agent well: is the agent executing your code in a real, hardware-isolated sandbox, or something lighter that's cheaper to run at scale? You generally can't tell from the outside. A product with thin margins has a real incentive to cut costs exactly there. rigless runs every session in a microVM-isolated sandbox — genuinely separate compute, not a shared container with permission rules — specifically because that's not a place to economize.
rigless is priced plainly: $10-$99/mo depending on concurrent sandboxes, a 7-day free trial with no credit card, and the option to bring your own model keys so your model spend goes directly to the provider. You're not trying to figure out what a "free" tier is actually monetizing behind the scenes.
"Free" agents | rigless | |
|---|---|---|
Cost | $0, funded elsewhere | $10-$99/mo, plainly priced |
Isolation model | Usually not disclosed | Microvm-isolated per session, by design |
Model spend | Often bundled/opaque | Direct to your provider via BYO key |
What you're trading | Unknown | Nothing hidden — you see the price |
If a free tool's isolation, reliability, and data handling hold up to the same scrutiny as a paid one, price alone isn't a reason to avoid it. But "free" is not itself evidence of that — it's a pitch. Before trusting any tool, free or paid, with a real codebase: how is it actually funded, what's the isolation model, and what happens to your code along the way. We'd rather answer those questions plainly than compete on not having to.