If you’re building on Base and shipping mini apps for Farcaster, you’ve probably felt it: some days you’re in a perfect flow, shipping features almost instinctively. Other days… everything feels heavy.

That’s exactly where “vibe coding” comes in: using AI tools so that coding feels more like jamming with a band than grinding through Jira tickets. The good news: in 2025 you can get a surprisingly strong AI stack for free (or almost free) and use it to ship onchain toys, dashboards, and Farcaster mini apps without burning money.

This post walks through free or generous-free-tier AI tools that work great for Base + Farcaster builders, plus how much you can realistically use them before hitting limits.

⚠️ All pricing and limits are as of late November 2025 and can change. Always check each product’s own pricing page before relying on it.

These tools are the closest thing we have to a LingGuang-style “flash app builder” in the West: you describe what you want, they scaffold a working project. Perfect for quickly spinning up Base dapps or Farcaster mini apps.

What it is

v0 is Vercel’s AI UI builder: you describe a component or page in natural language and it generates React/Next.js + Tailwind code. Great for quickly scaffolding:

• A Farcaster mini app dashboard for onchain XP

• A Base “prediction game” landing page

• Simple “Connect Wallet + Call Contract” views

Free usage

From the official pricing page: the Free plan is $0/month and includes:v0.app

• $5 of included monthly credits

• 7 AI messages per day

• Ability to deploy apps to Vercel, use Design Mode, and sync with GitHub

For vibe coding, that’s enough to:

• Generate a few components or pages per day

• Iteratively refine a small Base/Farcaster UI over a week or two

If v0 becomes your main design tool, you’ll probably outgrow the free plan and move to Premium, but for hackathons and small side projects, the free tier is totally usable.

What it is

Bolt.new is a browser-based, AI-native IDE where you can spin up full-stack projects, chat with an AI pair-programmer, and collaborate in real time. It feels like Google Docs + AI, but for code. It supports top models like GPT-4 and Claude and uses a token-based pricing model for paid plans.uibakery.io

You can easily say things like:

“Create a Vite + React frontend that calls a Solidity contract on Base and shows the result in a glassmorphism card.”

And then refine from there.

Free usage

A recent deep-dive on Bolt’s pricing notes that Bolt still offers a free tier that lets you:uibakery.io

• Use the editor

• Run basic AI prompts

• Test real-time collaboration

So you can:

• Prototype a Base-connected dapp

• Rough out a Farcaster mini app

• Try different UI ideas

…all without paying, as long as you’re not hammering the AI nonstop. Heavy daily use of frontier models will push you into paid territory, but for weekend vibe coding it’s fine.

What it is

Cursor is a VS-Code-style editor built around AI. It indexes your repo and lets you:

• Chat about your codebase (“refactor this hook”, “add events to this Solidity contract”)

• Get inline code edits and code review

• Use an agent to apply multi-file changes

Pricing docs show a Hobby (Free) tier with:Cursor

• Limited Agent requests

• Limited tab completions

• Unlimited access to “Cursor Ask” (chat-style help)

Free usage

For a Base + Farcaster builder, the free plan is enough to:

• Let the agent refactor a few files per day

• Have lots of “explain this code” / “write a test” conversations

• Use it as your main editor for smaller projects

If you’re building a large production app or coding many hours every day, the free plan will feel tight; Pro unlocks much higher usage. But for experimental mini apps and hackathon projects, the free tier is very usable.

These are “ChatGPT-style” tools with strong coding abilities you can use directly in the browser for free (with limits). Amazing for designing architectures, debugging tricky bugs, or iterating on contracts and SDK integrations.

What it is

Claude’s latest models (like Sonnet) are well-known for strong reasoning and careful code suggestions. They’re very good at:

• Reading long Base documentation and turning it into concise answers

• Designing Farcaster mini app flows and state machines

• Drafting safer Solidity or TypeScript before you refine it yourself

Anthropic’s own docs explain that there is a free tier with “session-based usage limits” that reset periodically; the exact message limit isn’t fixed and can vary by user and region.support.claude.com

Free usage

In practice, the free plan is great for:

• A few intense coding/debugging sessions per day

• Architectural design (“design a Farcaster mini app for daily Base quests”)

• High-level refactoring suggestions

When you hit the cap, you wait until the window resets or move to a paid plan.

What it is

Reka is a newer multimodal AI company with strong models like Reka Core and Reka Flash that can handle text, code, images, and even video. Independent reviews show Reka Core is competitive with high-end models on multimodal reasoning and code tasks.Skywork

Their chat playground at chat.reka.ai lets you experiment with these models in a browser UI.Skywork

Free usage

According to a 2025 overview of Reka, the chat playground is free for testing and casual use, while the API is paid and billed by tokens.Skywork+1

Practically:

• Great to brainstorm architectures, especially when you upload diagrams or screenshots

• Useful for inspecting transaction logs or error output (just be careful with secrets)

• Enough for semi-regular vibe coding sessions if you’re not pasting massive logs all day

When you want to call the models from your own dapp or backend (for example, a Base-native “AI code reviewer”), you’ll switch to the paid API.

What it is

DeepSeek offers both a public chat app and open-weight models. The official site advertises free access to the DeepSeek-V3.2 model via web and native apps as an “all-in-one AI tool.”deepseek.com

On the coding side, open-source models like DeepSeek-Coder V2 are trained specifically for code, with performance comparable to GPT-4-Turbo on code tasks in their benchmarks.Hugging Face+1

Free usage

• Web/app chat with DeepSeek-V3.2 is free to use, with optional paid API usage.deepseek.com

• Open-weight coder models can be run locally through tools like LM Studio or Ollama (more on that below).

Caution

A recent security analysis found that DeepSeek’s reasoning model can produce less secure code for prompts that include certain politically sensitive keywords, with more hard-coded secrets and weaker authentication.

For Web3, the rule should always be:

Treat all AI-generated Solidity and backend code as untrusted until you’ve reviewed and tested it yourself.

DeepSeek is powerful and free, but you should still do your own security review, especially for contracts handling real value.

Even if you’re “just coding”, sketching flows helps keep the vibe coherent.

What it is

Excalidraw is a beloved open-source infinite whiteboard. It recently added generative AI features to help with diagrams and flows.

Their comparison page shows:Excalidraw+

• Excalidraw (web) – “Free forever”, full editor features, infinite canvas, unlimited scenes

• Excalidraw+ (paid) – Adds cloud workspaces, extended AI, collaboration extras

Generative AI on the free whiteboard is available but limited compared to the paid “Plus” plan.Excalidraw+

Free usage

The free web version is perfect for:

• Drawing Farcaster mini app flows (auth → home → quest detail → share cast)

• Mapping out Base transaction lifecycles (user → dapp → call → events → indexer)

• Letting AI propose a first draft of your architecture diagram, then tweaking manually

You can do this endlessly without paying; you only hit limits if you need advanced team/enterprise features.

When you’re building DeFi, prediction games, or anything security-sensitive on Base, fast, accurate research matters as much as code completion.

What it is

Tavily is a developer-focused search API designed to plug directly into AI agents and RAG systems. Docs show integrations with OpenAI, LangChain, Vercel AI SDK, LlamaIndex and more.docs.tavily.com

It’s ideal if you want to build your own:

• “Base docs bot” that reads EIPs, Base blog posts, and RPC docs

• “Farcaster ecosystem explorer” that fetches links and context around frames, clients, and SDKs

Free usage

Tavily’s pricing page states:docs.tavily.com

• 1,000 credits per month for free, no credit card required

• Basic search → 1 credit per request

• Advanced search → 2 credits per request

So on the free tier you can easily:

• Run hundreds of searches per month from your local scripts or prototypes

• Build a personal research assistant that you use daily while coding

When your Base/Farcaster app goes to production and traffic grows, you can move to pay-as-you-go or a paid plan.

If you don’t want rate limits or you care about privacy (e.g., proprietary trading logic, secret offchain logic), local models are huge for vibe coding.

What LM Studio is

LM Studio is a desktop app that lets you run local LLMs (gpt-oss, Qwen3, DeepSeek and more) on your own machine. Their homepage states:

“Run local LLMs … on your computer, privately and for free” and notes that LM Studio is free for home and work use.LM Studio

You can also run LM Studio as a local server with an OpenAI-compatible API, then call it from your own tools or VSCode extensions.LM Studio

Open-source code models

Two standout open-source code LLM families often used with LM Studio are:

• Qwen2.5-Coder – The 32B Instruct model is reported by the Qwen team as a state-of-the-art open-source code model with coding abilities matching GPT-4o on their benchmarks.Hugging Face+1

• DeepSeek-Coder (V1/V2) – A family of code models (1B–33B, and a Mixture-of-Experts V2) trained heavily on code, with repo-level context and strong code completion capabilities.GitHub+2deepseekcoder.github.io+2

Free usage

• LM Studio app: free (no per-token fees), you just pay with electricity and your GPU/CPU.LM Studio

• Models: open-weight, so you can download and run them subject to their licenses.

This is ideal if you want a personal Copilot that:

• Never rate-limits you mid-hackathon

• Can see your entire Base/Farcaster monorepo

• Keeps sensitive code out of third-party servers

Of course, you need decent hardware and some patience to tune prompts, but once it’s set up, it’s a very “infinite vibe” experience.

If you prefer a more modular local setup, a common community pattern is:

• Ollama to run open-source models locally (DeepSeek-Coder, Qwen-Coder, etc.)ollama.com+1

• Continue extension in VS Code to connect your editor to that local modelChris Kirby+1

freeCodeCamp and other tutorials show step-by-step guides for this stack, and it’s all free/open-source software.freecodecamp.org+2Medium+2

Free usage here is “as much as your hardware can handle”.

What it is

GitHub Copilot Pro integrates directly into your editor (including VS Code) with inline completions and chat. It’s especially handy for:

• Filling in boilerplate for Farcaster Mini App SDK calls

• Writing tests for your Base contracts

• Generating documentation and READMEs

Free usage

According to GitHub’s official docs and Education page:

• GitHub Copilot Pro is free for verified students, teachers, and open-source maintainers.GitHub Docs+1

If you fit into one of those categories, you can run Copilot Pro at zero cost and let it handle routine code while you focus on higher-level vibe coding with other tools.

Here’s a practical “stack” you can use right now for Base + Farcaster:

Stack A – Cloud-first, minimal setup

• v0 Free → generate your Farcaster mini app UI and Base-connected components

• Claude Free → design flows, review Solidity and TypeScript, debug tricky issues

• Tavily Free → power a small research bot that fetches Base & Farcaster docs for you

• Excalidraw Free → sketch flows and contracts visually

Stack B – Editor-centric

• Cursor Free → main editor with repo-aware chat and agents

• Claude / DeepSeek / Reka chat (free) → high-level code reviews and refactors outside the repo

• Tavily → background research agent

Stack C – Local-heavy

• LM Studio + Qwen2.5-Coder → primary coding assistant, fully local

• Ollama + Continue → extra local completion / experimentation

• Excalidraw + Tavily → diagrams + research

• Cloud frontier model (Claude/DeepSeek) only when you truly need it

Whichever stack you pick, the core idea is the same:

Let AI handle the low-friction ideas and scaffolding, so you can spend your energy on the onchain logic, product decisions, and Farcaster-native UX.

Used carefully, these free tools are more than enough to make vibe coding on Base and Farcaster feel like play again.