Every small team reaches the same fork eventually. The managed AI coding tier works. Commits get generated, the agent runs on a free server, and the token counter resets every month. Then someone asks the question that starts a two-week detour: "Should we self-host?"
The detour usually ends in one of two places. A half-configured GPU box that nobody wants to maintain, or a quiet return to the managed tier with a new appreciation for what it does. This article is a way to skip the detour. It lays out a decision framework for choosing between a managed free tier and self-hosted alternatives, then provides a probe script that measures the difference instead of guessing.
The concrete example here is MonkeyCode, an open-source project that offers free model access and a free managed server for running coding agents. Disclosure: This article was prepared as part of MonkeyCode's product outreach. At the time of writing (August 2026), the project advertises a free allowance of 10 million tokens. Quotas, model names, and server details change, so confirm the current terms on the project page before planning around them.
Three questions that decide the architecture
Skip the feature lists. Three questions determine which deployment fits.
