Freebird AI: Free VS Code AI assistant, published on Open VSX with Ollama as the actual free tier (not just a fallback)

[Adilaw12]

Hello everyone, I am new here.

Wanted to make sure this is available here. Freebird (an AI coding assistant extension) is now on Open VSX, not just the Microsoft Marketplace.

The design choice most relevant to us here: Ollama is a first-class, fully-featured path, not an afterthought bolted onto a cloud product. When you use Freebird, it tries Ollama first when configured, only falls back to a small free cloud quota (Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite) if Ollama isn't reachable; no API key, no account, nothing leaves your machine on that path. Telemetry is opt-out (freebird.telemetry.enabled), and even the free cloud fallback only sends what's needed for the request, nothing else.

We have also added a "copy conversation" button recently; this exports prompts/responses as clean Markdown for sharing with a teammate, without ever including full file contents (the chat UI never receives those in the first place, so there's nothing to accidentally leak).

It's genuinely free for local/Ollama use. A paid tier exists for people who want cloud-hosted frontier models (Anthropic/OpenAI/DeepSeek/Qwen) via their own key, but that's a separate thing from the local story.

Link: https://open-vsx.org/extension/TenLabsAU/freebird-ai

Happy to answer questions about the Ollama routing/fallback logic, specifically if useful. Thank you for your time.