I love Claude Code. I really do—Anthropic’s Opus 4.5 is one of the best coding models we’ve ever seen. But if you’re a heavy dev like me, that “$20 plan” reality turns into a $200/month bill just to ship React components, and that’s honestly insane. In this video, I walk you through how to get ~90% of the Claude Code experience (terminal agent, file editing, tool calling) for $0—no API keys, no token anxiety, and with zero data leaving your machine. The core idea is simple: Claude Code is “just” a client that talks to a backend model. Instead of paying for Anthropic’s cloud infrastructure, I swap the backend to a local open-source model running on my own computer using Ollama. I show the exact setup: install Ollama, download a coding-capable model (I demo with a local model like GPD OSS 20B), install Claude Code, then point Claude to Ollama via environment variables (base URL to localhost:11434 plus a dummy token). After that, I run Claude with the local model and generate a working Hello World Next.js app end-to-end. The tradeoff is hardware—speed depends on your machine—but if you care about cost + privacy, going local is a seriously good move.