Qodo Gave Away Its Free Tool the Same Month It Cut Its Free Tier

Qodo donated its open-source PR-Agent repository to an independent community organization on April 23, 2026, in the same season its own pricing page stopped offering a permanent free tier. Both facts still hold on November 2, 2026, and one detail of the story changed along the way: the license.

The timing matters because most people researching Qodo still assume free and open source point at the same product. They no longer do. One path runs on volunteer governance and an MIT license. The other runs on a $30-a-month team plan with a 14-day trial in front of it. A team choosing between them is choosing two different organizations, not two tiers of one.

Hokai chart of who now runs each path, from Qodo's pricing page and the PR-Agent repository as checked on November 2, 2026.

What changed since August 12

This guide was first published on August 12, 2026 and re-checked against primary sources on November 2, 2026. The core story holds. Four details changed or were corrected.

The license row needs a note. Qodo's announcement said PR-Agent was "returning to the Apache 2.0 license". The repository's LICENSE file now reads MIT. A commit on July 9, 2026 is titled "From Apache-2.0 to MIT".

An unverifiable user count for Dosu was removed too. Nothing else in the guide's argument moved.

How the story unfolded

The order matters. Qodo announced one license and the community organization shipped another, which is the clearest evidence that the project is now steered by its own maintainers.

Qodo gave away its free product the same month it removed its free tier

Qodo's blog announced on April 23, 2026 that PR-Agent, the pull-request review tool the company built and open-sourced in 2023, was moving to a community-owned GitHub organization called The-PR-Agent. Naor Peled, an outside maintainer listed on the maintainers page of the database library TypeORM, became the project's first external maintainer. A governance committee of Peled, Qodo's Ofir Friedman and Dana Fine formed to guide the project. The company said it was exploring a move to a formal open-source foundation.

At almost the same time, Qodo's pricing page tightened the other side of the business. On November 2, 2026 it still states: "We don't offer a permanent free tier. After your trial, pick a paid plan to keep reviewing." The trial lasts 14 days, needs no credit card, and includes unlimited reviews and credits.

Qodo lists credits at $0.012 each, pooled across the team. The $30 base price is printed on the page. The mid and large prices above are that rate multiplied by the credit count, not figures Qodo prints.

Teams above 30 users are routed to a custom Enterprise plan with SSO and audit logs. Credits expire at the end of each monthly cycle, and usage beyond the pack continues as overage up to a monthly cap the customer sets.

One more line on the same page matters for open-source maintainers. Qualified open-source projects can apply to a separate Qodo for Open Source program for free access. That is an application, not a plan anyone can pick.

Several pricing round-ups still describe a permanent free Developer plan with 30 monthly PR reviews. That plan is not on Qodo's own site anymore. For the wider picture of how review tools price, see the best AI code review tools of 2026.

What actually changed at PR-Agent

The transfer is checkable independently of Qodo's press release. GitHub lists The-PR-Agent/pr-agent as the project's current home, with an MIT license, 13,872 stars, 2,034 forks and a commit on November 1, 2026. The repository description, set in the GitHub metadata itself, reads: "This project is not the Qodo free tier."

That line matters more than it looks. Qodo's own materials now describe a commercial platform built around multi-agent code review, rules, cross-repo review and a software map. PR-Agent's documentation describes something narrower. Its /review command posts feedback on possible issues, security concerns, tests and review effort for one pull request.

When a diff is large, the CLI output reports which files the token budget kept out of the review. Nothing in the transfer moved the commercial platform's features into the community repository. Qodo's own post says PR-Agent "has not kept pace with the Qodo platform".

Qodo does publish a benchmark page on which Qodo comes out with the strongest overall F1 score among the tools it evaluated. Treat that as a vendor's own comparison, not independent evidence. For a neutral read of the field, the Qodo versus Greptile comparison sets two commercial reviewers side by side,, while Qodo versus TestMu AI puts Qodo against a different kind of tool.

Who it affects, and who wins

Self-hosted and air-gapped teams are the clear winners. A community-owned, MIT-licensed tool with no vendor attached is what regulated shops and small open-source maintainers already wanted. Qodo's post stresses that PR-Agent is fully self-hostable, so a team can run it inside its own infrastructure and keep control of its data.

A repository that was still receiving commits on November 1 suggests it is being maintained rather than left to stagnate.

Dosu offers a useful contrast on the open-source side. Its site says it is free to get started on public open-source repositories through a free tier. It also says it open-sourced its auto-label and stale-issue tools so maintainers run them in their own GitHub Actions. That is a free tier the vendor keeps running, not a donation of ownership.

Teams that specifically want Qodo's newer platform, rather than PR-Agent, benefit in a narrower way. The pricing page's bluntness is itself useful, since it stops a buyer from budgeting around a free tier that will not survive contact with the sales page.

Who it quietly hurts

Anyone relying on a pricing aggregator instead of Qodo's own page gets bad information right now. That includes engineering leads who compare tools by reading round-ups rather than vendor sites. It also includes teams that used PR-Agent through Qodo's infrastructure and assumed a support line sat behind it. The governance committee is a volunteer structure, not a vendor SLA.

There is a second, quieter loser: tools that review only the diff. Greptile builds a graph index of a repository's files, functions and dependencies before it comments. Its pitch is that context beyond the diff catches problems a diff-only reviewer misses.

Greptile's own pricing text says its Starter plan is free for one developer with 50 credits a month. It says Pro has no seat fees and charges $1 per credit. A solo developer who wanted a free reviewer now has more than one place to look.

The money and data angle

The cost of "free" moves rather than disappears. A self-hosted PR-Agent has no license fee, but a team supplies its own model access and its own hosting, so the bill shifts from a Qodo credit pack to a model provider and a server.

Qodo's pack math gives a yardstick. Every pack in the table costs about the same per review, because credits scale evenly. A team that merges dozens of pull requests a week will burn through the base pack fast. Size from the trial's usage numbers, not from a guess.

A cheap check helps before buying. During the trial, note how many credits a typical small pull request draws and how many a large one does. Qodo says larger or more complex reviews draw more. Multiply by your weekly volume and compare with the pack sizes.

The data angle runs the other way. A hosted reviewer sees your diffs. Qodo's plan list mentions strict data retention, while a self-hosted PR-Agent keeps code inside infrastructure the team already controls, which is the reason regulated teams picked it before the transfer. Neither route removes the need to read the data terms of whichever model provider sits behind the reviewer. A team that wants the model on its own hardware as well can start from the local coding models guide.

If review is only one slice of what you want from AI on code, the broader assistants are a different purchase. Cursor, Claude Code, Aider and Tabnine are covered in the best AI coding assistants guide, and the free coding questions guide lists what costs nothing.

Sponsor spot open

The case for staying on PR-Agent anyway

Skeptics have a fair point. PR-Agent was already a secondary tool next to Qodo's platform, so swapping the GitHub organization at the top does not change what a working engineer sees day to day. The commands did not change when the repository moved, and the repository kept shipping.

What changed is who answers when something breaks. Qodo said its focus and investment need to move to the commercial platform, not the donated repository. That is an admission, not a marketing line. PR-Agent's roadmap now depends on volunteers and whichever foundation eventually adopts it.

The license reversal is a smaller signal of the same thing. The new owners make their own decisions, and users should read the LICENSE file instead of the press release. For a team that wants no vendor in the loop, that independence is the feature.

How to check this yourself in ten minutes

Every claim in this guide can be re-read on a primary page. That matters here, because round-ups lag vendors by months. The checks below take about ten minutes and need no account. Start from the Qodo record for the vendor's links, and from the code review roundup if you want the wider field.

If any of the four disagrees with this page, trust the primary page. This guide's sources carry the date each was opened.

What a vendor's open-source handoff usually signals

A company that donates a tool while tightening its paid plans is making a focus decision. Companies do this when a free product has stopped feeding the paid one, and when the people who maintain it are better placed outside the company. It is also making a support decision. Qodo's post says its attention and investment go to the commercial platform. That reads as honest, and it tells buyers what to expect: the paid product gets the roadmap, the free product gets the community.

For a buyer, the practical rule is to price the two paths separately. The free path costs engineering time when something breaks. The paid path costs credits, and buys a vendor to call. Neither is wrong. Teams that decide with the split in mind tend to avoid the surprise bills and the surprise silences. Mixing them up is the mistake, for example by budgeting for a free tier that exists only as a 14-day trial, or by assuming a donated repository still has a vendor behind it.

How to choose

CodeRabbit and GitHub Copilot are other review options in the directory. Whichever you trial, run it on the same five or six real pull requests, because a reviewer's noise level only shows on your own code.

What would change this

The governance committee said in April it was exploring a formal foundation transfer. If PR-Agent has not moved under a named foundation by the end of 2026, treat the current arrangement as closer to a maintained donation than real independent governance.

The sharper test is technical. If a future PR-Agent release adds anything like whole-repository context, this was a real fork. If it does not, it was a repository transfer with good timing.

Two smaller signals are worth watching. Another change to the LICENSE file would be news. So would a Qodo pricing page that brings back a permanent free plan, which would make this guide's premise obsolete. Both are one page-load to check, and the code review roundup is where any shift will be tracked first.

Further reading

• Best AI coding assistants of 2026 for the wider assistant market beyond review.
• Best AI agents of 2026 for agent products that open pull requests, not only review them.
• Cursor Composer 2 versus Claude Code for two coding agents compared directly.
• TestMu AI for the testing tool Qodo is compared with in the TestMu guide.
• GitHub, the host of the PR-Agent repository, for the platform view.

Frequently asked questions

Is PR-Agent still free?

Yes. PR-Agent is open source under an MIT license, per its LICENSE file on November 2, 2026, and needs no Qodo subscription. You pay only for the model API you connect. It has been maintained by a community organization since April 23, 2026.

Does Qodo still offer a free tier?

No permanent one. Qodo's pricing page says it does not offer a permanent free tier and gives a 14-day trial with unlimited reviews. After that the Pro Team plan starts at $30 a month, or teams above 30 users take a custom Enterprise plan. Qualified open-source projects can apply for free access.

Is the $30 Qodo plan per seat?

No. Qodo sells it as a team plan for up to 30 users that draws on one shared pool of 2,500 credits, about 18 reviews a month. Credits cost $0.012 each, expire monthly, and extra usage runs as overage up to a cap the customer sets.

Who maintains PR-Agent now?

Naor Peled, an external maintainer also listed on the TypeORM maintainers page, leads it with Ofir Friedman and Dana Fine of Qodo on a governance committee. The committee said it was exploring a move to a formal open-source foundation. No foundation had been named when this guide was re-checked.

How does Qodo compare to Greptile or Dosu for code review?

Greptile builds a graph index of a repository's files, functions and dependencies before reviewing, and offers a free Starter plan for one developer. Dosu focuses on issue triage and documentation, and is free to start on public open-source repositories. Neither is a drop-in copy of PR-Agent.

Covered in this guide

• Qodo: AI code review and test generation platform with a multi-agent architecture that scores highest for real-bug detection among independently benchmarked code review tools.
• Aider: Free, open-source terminal pair programmer that edits your git repo and commits each change; bring your own LLM key. 49,000+ GitHub stars.
• CodeRabbit: AI reviewer for pull requests on four Git hosts and in three IDEs, free for public repositories and billed per developer for private ones.
• Cursor: Cursor is an AI code editor built on VS Code, widely adopted across large enterprise engineering teams, with Agent Mode, Tab completion, and Cloud Agents.
• Dosu: AI knowledge layer for coding agents. Captures what engineers and agents learn across GitHub, Slack and Notion, shares it via MCP, and auto-syncs docs. Free plan covers public repos only.
• GitHub: Founded in 2008, GitHub is the largest code repository and collaboration platform with 140M+ developers, now integrated into Microsoft's CoreAI division after CEO Thomas Dohmke departed end of 2025.
• GitHub Copilot: GitHub's AI coding assistant with agent mode, Copilot Fusion model routing and MCP support across 6 IDEs, plus a free plan with no credit card required.
• Tabnine: Enterprise AI coding assistant with privacy-first architecture, agentic workflows, and flexible deployment
• TestMu AI: Agentic AI quality engineering platform combining a cross-browser, cross-device testing cloud with AI-generated tests, free tier included. Recognized as a 2025 Gartner Magic Quadrant Challenger.

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