I've been running my agent work through Ollama Cloud's Pro plan: $20/month, which includes $60 of monthly usage credits at published per-token rates. This week I moved to Command Code's GOAT plan: $10/month, which includes $70 of credits. Same open models, half the price, more credits. That's not a subtle difference — it's the kind of thing you notice on a bank statement.
Here's the reasoning, and the one part of the deal I think is genuinely underrated.
What changed at Ollama
Ollama reworked its paid plans on 31 August 2026. The headline change was billing model: away from GPU-time-based usage and on to transparent per-token pricing, with every plan carrying a pool of monthly usage credits.
- Pro: $20/month, includes $60 of monthly usage
- Max: $100/month, includes $300 of monthly usage
- Team: $500/month, includes $1,000 of shared monthly usage
- Free: a starter amount each month for a set of starter models, plus pay-as-you-go credits if you want everything
The stated reason was predictability — GPU-time billing was hard to forecast, especially now that open models have grown enormous (Kimi K3 is 2.8 trillion parameters). Token pricing is boring and standard, which is exactly what you want from a bill. The old session and weekly limits are gone too, which is a real improvement.
Two catches worth knowing if you're weighing it up:
- Included usage doesn't roll over. Use less than $60 in a month and the balance refreshes anyway — the unused portion is gone.
- The credits are a discount, not free money. $60 of usage on a $20 plan is a good multiple, but it's still metered per token, at rates you can read on the model pricing table.
You can read Ollama's own write-up in Ollama's transparent pricing, and the current numbers on the Ollama pricing page.
Why I moved to GOAT
The Command Code GOAT plan is $10/month (plus a processing fee) and includes $70 of usage, which the pricing page describes as going up to roughly $100 of effective usage once the per-model deals are applied. That's about 75,000 requests, spread across per-model allowances — GPT-5.6 Sol, GLM-5.2, Tencent Hy3, Qwen 3.8 27B, DeepSeek V4 Flash, and a long tail of Kimi, MiniMax, Grok, Step and friends.
So the comparison I actually made was:
| Ollama Pro | Command Code GOAT | |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly price | $20 | $10 |
| Included credits | $60 | $70 (up to ~$100 with deals) |
| Unused credits roll over | No | Yes, on top-ups |
| Top-ups | At per-token rate | At model cost, zero markup |
I'm wary of overselling this. Ollama's plan isn't bad — a 3× credit multiple is a fair deal, and if you're already invested in pulling models locally, staying in one ecosystem has real value. But when two services are serving broadly the same open models and one charges half as much for more credits, the decision makes itself. The roll-over on top-ups matters more to me than I expected, too: I have months where I barely touch the agent, and I don't like watching a credit balance evaporate on the 1st.
The free models are the quiet win
The part I keep coming back to is the free tiers. Command Code includes, on every plan including the $1 Go tier:
- Laguna S 2.1 — requests cost no credits while capacity lasts
- Ling 3.0 Flash and Ling 3.0 Flash Sante — free while they last
Set against a metered bill, that's a meaningful change to how I work. The smaller mechanical jobs — renaming a symbol across a repo, scaffolding a test file, a quick "which of these two functions is the odd one out" — don't need a frontier model. They need something fast that doesn't bill. Having a genuinely usable free model means those requests stop being a line item, and I stop rationing the small stuff.
That reframes the whole budget. The $70 of credits is not "77% of my month" — it's the pool I spend on the requests that deserve a premium model, while the free models absorb the churn around them. On a metered-only plan, every request is a decision. This is closer to: use the good model when it matters, and don't think about the rest.
On the harness — I still prefer Pi
I'll be honest about this, because it would be a strange review without it: Pi is still my preferred agent. There are things about the way it works that I've internalised, and reaching for anything else still feels like wearing someone else's shoes for the first hour.
But the Command Code harness is quite good, and better than I expected going in. Plan mode does what it says — read-only exploration, an actual plan you approve before anything is written. The taste system learns my preferences and stops repeating corrections, which is the single most annoying failure mode of every other agent I've used. Worktrees, headless mode, session forking and /review for pull requests are all just there, not bolted on. And switching models mid-session with Alt+P makes the free-model workflow above practical, because I can drop down to a free model for a small task and back up without losing the thread.
Is it going to displace Pi for me? Not today. Is it good enough that I stopped noticing I was using it after the first week? Yes — and that's the higher bar.
Worth it?
$10/month for $70 of credits on open models, plus free models for the small jobs, is the best value I've found for the way I actually work. Ollama's move to transparent token pricing is a genuine improvement and the two are much closer than they were six months ago — but closing the predictability gap didn't close the price gap.
If you're paying $20/month somewhere for open-model agent access, it's worth doing the arithmetic on the GOAT plan against what you're on now. Worst case, you learn your current plan is fine.