Why Fred?

I'd been using Claude Code for a while and noticed two things at the same time. First, the agent loop is genuinely good — Anthropic figured out how a coding CLI should feel. Second, my monthly Claude bill kept creeping up because the loop wants to read a lot of files, and most of those reads cost real money.

DeepSeek had just published per-token rates that were an order of magnitude lower than Sonnet's. Same shape — input/cached/output — at roughly $0.14 / M input · $0.28 / M output versus Anthropic's $3 / M · $15 / M. The model is smaller, but for a tool whose job is structural code edits and tests-pass loops, that tradeoff felt fine.

So I built Fred. The CLI — fred — is a Python coding agent built around the tool surface that's become standard for this kind of thing: view, str_replace, glob, grep, bash with permission gating, and a --yolo escape hatch when you're ready to stop confirming every command. It's open source and runs against DeepSeek directly with your own key, or through this proxy if you'd rather not manage one.

This site is the half of Fred that isn't open: a streaming proxy that adds billing, usage analytics, and a single account so you don't have to manage a DeepSeek API key yourself. It's pay-as-you-go credits, $1 free on signup, no subscription. I take a 2.5× margin, which means even with the wrapper Fred is roughly 12× cheaper per session at published rates than going direct to Anthropic.

That's the whole pitch. There's no fabricated traction, no pretend testimonials, no fake user count on the homepage. The numbers on /pricing come straight from the same lib/pricing.ts the proxy bills against. The competitor numbers on /compare are each provider's own published rate.

If you want a cheap coding agent that lives in your terminal, give it a shot:

uv tool install fredcode
fred login

You get $1 in credits to play with, and if you'd rather skip the proxy entirely, the CLI works against DeepSeek directly with DEEPSEEK_API_KEY. Either way: write me at hello@fredcode.net if something on the site doesn't add up.

— Nolan