A free tier is not a budget until something refuses a request on your behalf. That sentence ended a pairing session last week, after four questions and two dead ends produced a small pre-flight gate that now runs before every prompt our team sends to a hosted coding model. The gate is under forty lines of standard-library Python, it has a table-driven test, and it would still be worth keeping if every hosted tool disappeared tomorrow.

The setup, in numbers rather than adjectives

The session started from a concrete constraint: a free tier for AI coding work, an open-source client to drive it, and a free server option for anything that needed to stay running. The operator of MonkeyCode states that the project is open source, that free model access is available, that a free server option exists, and that the free allocation includes 10 million tokens.…