Disclosure: some links on this page may be affiliate links; we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. Read the disclosure.
By the toolist.ai editors. Read from Cline's pricing page, not hands-on tested by toolist.ai. Updated October 30, 2026.
Cline pricing
Cline's cheapest paid plan is ClinePass at $9.99 a month billed monthly.
Free plan: Cline is free in VS Code and its forks, JetBrains IDEs, the terminal, a desktop app in beta and cloud sessions in the browser, and open source (Apache 2.0) except the JetBrains plugin, whose Marketplace page links no source code and names Cline's terms as its license; the editor extension needs no account. The AI is paid for separately: your own API key at your provider's rates, a Claude Pro or Max or ChatGPT plan you already have, Cline credits (which Cline's pricing page says it sells at cost), or a local model at no charge. A Cline account also gets rotating free models up to a limited quota, and Cline says usage of those free models may be used to improve the models.
| Plan | Billed monthly | Billed yearly, per month | Includes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Open source (free) | free | not listed | Cline in VS Code and its forks, JetBrains IDEs, the CLI, Desktop (beta), Kanban and the SDK, plus cloud agents in the browser; bring your own API key, a Claude Pro or Max or ChatGPT plan, or a local model, or pay with Cline credits; rotating free models up to a limited quota with a Cline account; community support |
| Cline provider (pay-as-you-go credits) | not listed | not listed | Prepaid Cline credits on one balance across more than 100 models (300-plus by Cline's Desktop guide), with one sign-in and no API keys; Cline's pricing page says inference is sold at cost and the ClinePass page calls it pay-as-you-go API rates, with no per-model price list on Cline's public pages; no subscription; unused credits are non-refundable under Cline's terms |
| ClinePass | $9.99 | not listed | Monthly subscription, renewing automatically: 12 models (Cline's docs list), mostly open-weight (Muse Spark 1.3 Contributor is Meta's hosted model), with quotas Cline puts at 2-5x the usage of standard API rate limits, measured over a rolling 5-hour window, the calendar week and the calendar month (no figures published); works in the IDE extensions, CLI, Desktop, cloud agents and SDK, and in other agents through a ClinePass API key; an additional processing fee may apply; no yearly price published |
| Enterprise | not listed | not listed | Contact sales, custom pricing: SSO, an SLA and dedicated support, centralized billing, role-based access control, limits on which inference providers members use, a team management dashboard and authentication logs; runs on your own inference contracts (AWS Bedrock, Google Vertex AI, Azure OpenAI and others) at your negotiated rates with no Cline markup; OpenTelemetry export and prompt storage in your own S3 or R2 bucket |
| Cost per finished minute | Not measured by us, and the vendor does not publish an allowance we can divide by. |
|---|
Prices last checked: 2026-10-30 on Cline's pricing page.
Price history
No price change since we first recorded these prices on October 21, 2026. We re-check them every week and list each change here.
To price your own month on Cline and the tools like it, use the AI cost calculator.
Before you pay
- Cline is free, but the AI is not: with your own key every request is billed by your provider at its own token rates, so the cost depends on the model and how many turns the agent takes, and Cline publishes no estimate. Cline credits carry no markup by Cline's account ('at cost' on its pricing page), but its public pages list no per-model credit prices outside ClinePass's reference table. Running on a Claude Pro or Max plan instead draws on that plan's limits, and Cline's docs say image uploads and prompt caching are limited in that mode.
- ClinePass publishes no quota numbers: usage is measured against a rolling 5-hour window, the calendar week and the calendar month, and the only figure is '2-5x the usage' of standard API rate limits. Cline's docs say its per-token reference prices show how usage counts against the quota, so a pricier model such as Kimi K3 ($3 input, $15 output per million tokens) uses it far faster than MiMo-V2.5 ($0.14, $0.28). Two of Trustpilot's three reviews complain about a paid plan's limits: one (September 2026) says the 5-hour limit allowed about 10 minutes of use, the other (October 2026) that one day used 60 percent of the monthly limit. The line-up changes: Cline's docs say GLM-5.2, Kimi K2.6, Kimi K2.7 Code and DeepSeek V4 Flash were withdrawn for capacity and upgrades, while the ClinePass page and model directory still list them.
- ClinePass renews automatically every month until you cancel in your account settings before the renewal date; you keep access to the end of the paid month. Cline says an 'additional processing fee may apply' without saying how much, its terms say fees exclude taxes and are non-refundable (unused credits and unused subscription time included) unless the law requires otherwise, and free trials bill automatically the day after they end. No yearly price is published. The $4.99 first month that ran from launch on June 29, 2026 ended between August 31 and September 18, though the page still says $9.99 is the rate 'after promotion period'; Cline's launch post offers ClinePass for $1.99 through the Cline CLI 'for a limited period' and still says so, but no other Cline page we read mentions that offer, so whether it still applies is unclear.
- Data depends on the provider: with your own key and your own infrastructure, Cline's terms say it does not receive your prompts or code. Through the Cline provider or ClinePass, your prompts and code pass through Cline to third-party model providers, which may use them for training unless you opt out where they offer it; Cline's telemetry for those requests can include the prompt and the model's response; and its terms license Cline to use your content to improve and develop its products, except while you hold a per-seat subscription. ClinePass's Muse Spark 1.3 Contributor has the name and reference prices of the Contributor mode of Meta's API, in which, Meta's docs say, your prompts, code and the responses may be used to train future Meta models. Cline's FAQ says it never trains models on code and prompts sent through its credits, while its free-models page says free-model usage may be used to improve the models.
- Telemetry is on by default in the VS Code and JetBrains extensions, Cline Desktop and the CLI, even with your own keys: features and tools used, tasks, errors, token counts, model and provider names, your editor and operating system, a device identifier, and your account when signed in. You can turn it off (in the CLI by editing a settings file and stopping its background hub), after which Cline still contacts its servers for sign-in and feature flags.
- Safety rests on your approvals: auto-approve's 'safe commands' are the ones the model itself marks safe, not a fixed allowlist, and YOLO mode approves everything, including file changes anywhere on your system and destructive commands. Cline is removing .clineignore because it never stopped access to files (shell commands could still read them). On February 17, 2026 an unauthorized party used a compromised token to publish Cline CLI 2.3.0 to npm, which for about eight hours installed the OpenClaw agent without users' knowledge; The Register, citing StepSecurity, put downloads at about 4,000, the fix is version 2.4.0 or later, and Cline now publishes through GitHub Actions with OIDC provenance.
- Local models need serious hardware: Cline's docs suggest 16-32GB of memory for small quantized models and 64GB or more for larger ones, The Register recommends a GPU with 24GB of memory or a Mac with 32GB and warns that Cline's system prompt can bring weaker hardware to a crawl, and XDA's tester hit a context-window error until he raised Devstral's context from 8,192 to 32K tokens.
- Cline's own pages disagree in places: the pricing page says 'no subscriptions', lists only Free and Enterprise (not ClinePass) and lists the JetBrains extension as an Enterprise feature, while the JetBrains plugin is free on the JetBrains Marketplace and the IDE page marks it early access. The Desktop app is a beta with frequent builds, Kanban is a research preview, and cloud agents work only with GitHub. The Teams plan the pricing page showed in December 2025 (free through 2025, then $20 a user a month with the first 10 seats free) is gone; teams now go through Enterprise at a custom price.
- All three cited tests were published in April and May 2026, while Cline's extension was on its 3.x releases (two of them on local models, the third naming no model): before Cline 4.0 (June 26, 2026), ClinePass (June 29), the SDK-based agent harness Cline finished rolling out to its VS Code extension on August 23 (Cline says it cut tasks that hit its three-mistakes-in-a-row limit from 6.34% to 0.62%), Cline Desktop and the cloud agents. None reports using Cline's own providers, a frontier model through Cline, the CLI or the JetBrains plugin, and none names the Cline version tested.
See the full Cline review and how we research.
Sources
- ClinePass - Open Weights Models in Cline (read from Canada, in a headless Chrome and through a US reader) (checked 2026-10-21)
- Pricing - Cline AI Coding Agent (checked 2026-10-21)
- Cline - AI Coding, Open Source and Open Choice (home page) (checked 2026-10-21)
- Cline Frequently Asked Questions (checked 2026-10-21)
- Cline Enterprise - AI Coding Agent for Teams (checked 2026-10-21)
- Cline IDE - The Coding Agent for VS Code, JetBrains, Cursor, and Windsurf (checked 2026-10-21)
- Cline CLI - Coding Agents in Your Terminal and on a Kanban Board (checked 2026-10-21)
- Cline for Desktop (Beta) - The Cline Coding Agent as a Native Desktop App (checked 2026-10-21)
- Cline Cloud - Coding Agents That Run in the Cloud, From Your Browser (checked 2026-10-21)
- AI Models You Can Try in Cline | ClinePass, OpenAI, Anthropic (checked 2026-10-21)
- Cline Terms of Service (last modified September 25, 2025) (checked 2026-10-21)
- Cline Privacy Notice (last updated September 24, 2025) (checked 2026-10-21)
- Cline docs: ClinePass (checked 2026-10-21)
- Cline docs: Cline (usage-billing) (checked 2026-10-21)
- Cline docs: Cline Free Models (checked 2026-10-21)
- Cline docs: Authorization (checked 2026-10-21)
- Cline docs: Cline Overview (checked 2026-10-21)
- Cline docs: Installing Cline (checked 2026-10-21)
- Cline docs: Anthropic / Claude Code (checked 2026-10-21)
- Cline docs: OpenAI (Codex) (checked 2026-10-21)
- Cline docs: Local models (checked 2026-10-21)
- Cline docs: Cline Desktop (checked 2026-10-21)
- Cline docs: Cline Cloud Agents (checked 2026-10-21)
- Cline docs: ACP (checked 2026-10-21)
- Cline docs: Kanban (checked 2026-10-21)
- Cline docs: Plan & Act Mode (checked 2026-10-21)
- Cline docs: Checkpoints (checked 2026-10-21)
- Cline docs: Auto Approve & YOLO Mode (checked 2026-10-21)
- Cline docs: Deprecations (.clineignore) (checked 2026-10-21)
- Cline docs: Cline Telemetry (checked 2026-10-21)
- Cline docs: Cline Enterprise (checked 2026-10-21)
- Cline Blog: ClinePass, Best of Value for Open-Weight models (June 29, 2026) (checked 2026-10-21)
- Cline Blog: How We Migrated 11 Million Users to Cline's Biggest Harness Upgrade (September 2, 2026) (checked 2026-10-21)
- Cline Blog: Cline Desktop, An open-source app for open-weight models (September 14, 2026) (checked 2026-10-21)
- Internet Archive: ClinePass page on August 31, 2026 ($4.99 first month offer) (checked 2026-10-21)
- Internet Archive: ClinePass page on September 18, 2026 ($9.99, no offer) (checked 2026-10-21)
- Internet Archive: Cline pricing page on December 3, 2025 (Teams plan) (checked 2026-10-21)
- GitHub: cline/cline releases (v4.0.0 on June 26, 2026; v4.1.25, CLI 3.0.73 and Desktop 0.0.48 in October 2026) (checked 2026-10-21)
- Cline - IntelliJ IDEs Plugin | Marketplace (checked 2026-10-21)
- Models - Meta Model API (checked 2026-10-21)
- Pricing and rate limits - Meta Model API (checked 2026-10-21)
- The Register: How to roll your own local AI coding agents (checked 2026-10-21)
- XDA: My homelab needed a lightweight dashboard, so I had Claude and a local LLM race to build it (checked 2026-10-21)
- XDA: I tested Claude Code against 3 open-source alternatives, and one came surprisingly close (checked 2026-10-21)
- The Register: AI coding assistant Cline compromised, installs OpenClaw (February 20, 2026) (checked 2026-10-21)
- Cline Reviews | Read Customer Service Reviews of cline.bot (Trustpilot) (checked 2026-10-21)
- VS Code Marketplace: Cline (checked 2026-10-21)