Note: The primary source (VentureBeat) was unavailable at the time of writing due to access restrictions. Claims in this article that could not be independently verified are noted below.
Anthropic’s Claude Code, a terminal-based agent that can write, debug, and deploy code, has attracted developer complaints over its pricing structure. Subscriptions run from $20 to $200 per month depending on the tier, and usage caps have left some developers hitting limits mid-session. Goose, an open-source AI agent built by Block — the financial technology company led by Jack Dorsey — offers comparable functionality with no subscription and no rate limits, according to VentureBeat’s reporting.
The specific GitHub statistics reported in VentureBeat’s article — including star counts, contributor numbers, version numbers, and dates — could not be independently verified at time of writing and have been omitted.
Claude Code’s pricing structure
Claude Code is available through Anthropic’s Pro plan at $20 per month. The Max plans at $100 and $200 per month offer more usage headroom and include access to Claude Opus. The specific prompt limits, hour-based weekly limits, and token conversion figures reported by VentureBeat could not be independently verified at time of writing and have been omitted.
Anthropic has said the rate limits affect fewer than five percent of users and target people running Claude Code continuously. The company has not publicly clarified whether that five percent refers to Max subscribers specifically or all users.
How Goose works
Goose is described by Block as an agent that runs on-machine and can install, execute, edit, and test code with any supported LLM, according to VentureBeat’s reporting. Unlike Claude Code, which processes queries through Anthropic’s servers, Goose can run entirely on a local machine using open-source language models downloaded and controlled by the user.
That model-agnosticism is a core differentiator: Goose can connect to Anthropic’s Claude models via API, OpenAI’s models, Google’s Gemini, or routing services like Groq and OpenRouter. It can also run entirely locally through tools like Ollama, according to VentureBeat.
What Goose can do
Goose operates as a command-line tool or desktop application capable of performing development tasks. According to its documentation, it can build projects from scratch, write and execute code, debug failures, orchestrate workflows across multiple files, and interact with external APIs.
The architecture relies on tool calling — the same pattern used by Claude Code and other agentic systems — where the model invokes external functions rather than just generating text responses.
Goose’s core functionality is free regardless of usage volume. The only cost comes from API tokens if a developer chooses to route queries through a commercial model provider, and even that can be eliminated with a fully local setup.
VentureBeat’s reporting notes that real-world performance on complex tasks depends heavily on which underlying model a developer chooses to run.