The open-model coding preview that ends on 14 October, and what it does to your plan

The open-model coding preview that ends on 14 October, and what it does to your plan

20 September 2026 — A research preview running from 14 September to 14 October offers a third coding agent that runs only on open-source models, with far more usage than the paid agents beside it. The interesting part is not the agent. It is that the company has written down the exchange rate, and that the window closes in three weeks with different consequences depending on which plan you are on.

What is actually on offer

The agent runs on open models — a fast variant recommended for most work, its larger sibling, and two further models flagged as experimental that consume an allowance faster. A subscriber on the $25-a-month plan, billed yearly, gets up to fifty times more usage on those models at no extra cost for the duration of the preview. A new $9-a-month standalone plan, currently behind a waitlist, also carries it. It is not offered on team or enterprise plans.

The price of the extra usage is consent. What is collected is listed rather than implied: prompts, code, project files and configuration, the tool calls the product makes, edit histories, and the fix traces it generates. The material is de-identified and passed to a partner to train open-weight models. Sessions originating in the EEA, the United Kingdom and Switzerland are excluded from training.

On capability the company publishes its own figure and labels it as its own: 92.2 on an index it maintains, against 101.0 for the best paid model in the product.

The part with a date on it

On 14 October the preview ends, and the two plans part company. Subscribers on the cheaper standalone plan keep the agent indefinitely. Subscribers on the more expensive plan lose it and keep the two paid agents. Extra usage cannot be bought, usage resets on the renewal date with no daily cap, and PDF uploads are not supported.

What it means for a buyer

If a team has been leaning on the extra allowance, the question to settle before mid-October is whether the work it is doing survives the window — and, if it does, whether the answer is to move people to the cheaper plan, which is the only one that keeps the feature.

The consent question deserves a separate decision from the pricing one, and it should be made by whoever owns your source code rather than by whoever owns the subscription. Being able to describe the trade this precisely is a point in the company's favour; several competitors run a comparable arrangement and leave it in a sub-clause. That is the thing to check about whatever you use instead.

Sources

• Bolt, "What is Bolt Forge?" — 14 September 2026
• Bolt support, "Bolt Forge" plan and data terms (read 20 September 2026) — 20 September 2026