September 20, 2026
Cline gives away Kimi K3 for free on desktop: the same model costs $15 per million output tokens via API
In its first week, the desktop app handled 6% of all Cline tasks, half of them from new users.
Cline
@cline
One week after launch, Cline Desktop already accounts for more than 6% of all tasks. And half of them come from brand-new users—welcome aboard! ❤️💪 (If you haven't tried it yet: Kimi K3 is free in the app for a limited time. Give it a try!)
Introducing Cline Desktop - a native interface for working with open weights models. Use with ClinePass and all our free models like DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash, Musespark-1.3, or BYOK with any provider!
· 39K views
A week ago, Cline released a standalone app for open-weight models. It now handles every sixteenth task on the service.
Half of those tasks came from people who had never used the service before. In its first week, Cline shipped five desktop builds, from 0.0.28 to 0.0.32.
What's free. Kimi K3 is currently free in the app, and the giveaway is promised to last "as long as we can." Via API, the same model costs $3 per million input tokens and $15 per million output tokens (BenchLM, 18.09.2026). In Cline's harness on Terminal-Bench 2.0, it scores 82,02%, higher than the app's other open models.
How to install it. Download it from cline.bot/desktop: the macOS build is ready, the Windows version is in beta, and the installer is signed and self-updates. Then open a workspace, choose a provider and model, and start a session. Free models require a Cline account, have limited quota, and do not work through the Cline API—only in the app, extension, and CLI.
Cline previously existed as an editor extension and a terminal command. Now it has its own window: parallel sessions across different workspaces, scheduled tasks such as an overnight repository sweep, and imported conversations from Claude Code and Codex to continue them on open models.
When the Kimi K3 giveaway ends, the same model will remain available in ClinePass for $9.99 per month.
Source
