One way to use large-scale models affordably is through Ollama Cloud. The disadvantage is that Ollama Cloud, unlike other services, does not clearly disclose usage limits for each subscription plan. Instead, it only states "Free Tier basis x5 Pro ($10/month, $200/year), x50 MAX ($100/month)", making it difficult to choose which plan to subscribe to.
Reddit user Franck attempted to estimate this based on Free Tier usage. Similar to Claude Code, with a 5-hour/weekly usage limit, he "estimated" the hourly usage as follows.
Based on "Free tier" 5 hours - 2M tokens/week - 5M tokens, he estimated Pro/Max usage. According to the estimation results, Pro 5 hours - 100M tokens/week - 250M tokens, and MAX 5 hours - 500M tokens/week - 1.25B tokens respectively.
I am currently testing openclaw, opencode, and local LLM environments using ollama, and I am using ollama cloud (free) for large-scale models like the gemma4:31b model. If the usage limit is around the estimated threshold mentioned above, I plan to try it within the Free tier first, and upgrade to Pro if needed.
Note 1) I estimate Claude Code Pro's weekly limit to be approximately 1.5M tokens (=44k/5 hours x 24 hours x 7 days).
Note 2) In the case of ollama cloud, there are also claims that it is based on GPU resource consumption rather than token usage, so please note this.
Note 3) There are also arguments that OpenCode Go ($10/month) is more cost-effective compared to ollama cloud. However, OpenCode Go has limitations on which AI models can be used.
Since the Reddit URL was blocked, I am noting the source as follows.
[Source] Title: tracked_my_ollama_cloud_free_tier_usage_to (reddit - r/openclaw)
