7 ms·

An update to our pricing

127 points by mefengl 1y ago

jawns 1y ago
As an avid Windsurf user, I support this simplification of the pricing. In nearly all cases, I don't care how many individual steps the model needs to take to accomplish the task. I just want it to do what I've asked it to do. It is curious, however, that this move is coinciding with rumors of OpenAI attempting to acquire Windsurf. If an acquisition were imminent, it would seem strange to mess with the pricing structure soon beforehand.
- jelling 1y ago
  Clarifying the pricing would make it easier to value the revenue from current and future users. And naturally they rounded up to leave themselves literal margin for error.
- Jcampuzano2 1y ago
  Curious - what makes you pick, windsurf over other editors. I currently use Cursor but have seen more news about windsurf, especially after the recent news with respect to OpenAI. Do you find it better, worse, etc. And are there things it does better for you than other editors.
  - leobuskin 1y ago
    I don't like the "vibe" term nowadays, but when you mix two pretty abstract domains (AI and development), it's all about vibes and aura. Some model/agent works perfectly for one of us (let's keep in mind, we have a bunch of factors, from language to the complexity of the implementation), and does everything wrong for others. You just can't measure it properly, outside of experiments and building your own assessment within your context. All the recommendations here just don't work. "Try all of them, stick with one for a while, don't forget to retry others on a regular basis" - that's my moto today. Cursor (as an agent/orchestrator) didn't work for me at all (Python, low-level, no frameworks, not webdev). I fell in love with Windsurf ($60 tier initially). Switched entirely to JetBrains AI a few days ago (vscode is not friendly for me, PyCharm rocks), so happy about the price drop.
  - TiredOfLife 1y ago
    For me it was the awesome and more important free autocomplete that i used when it was still called codeium
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
croes 1y ago
Related? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43708725 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43708725
- dang 1y ago
  Thanks! Macroexpanded: Why is OpenAI buying Windsurf? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43743993 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43743993 - April 2025 (218 comments) OpenAI looked at buying Cursor creator before turning to Windsurf - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43716856 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43716856 - April 2025 (115 comments) OpenAI in Talks to Buy Windsurf for About $3B - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43708725 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43708725 - April 2025 (44 comments)
rudedogg 1y ago
> To train, develop, and improve the artificial intelligence, machine learning, and models that we use to support our Services. We may use your Log and Usage Information and Prompts and Outputs Information for this purpose. https://windsurf.com/privacy-policy https://windsurf.com/privacy-policy Am I the only one bothered by this? Same with Gemini Advanced (paid) training on your prompts. It feels like I’m paying with money, but also handing over my entire codebase to improve your products. Can’t you do synthetic training data generation at this point, along with the massive amount of Q/A online to not require this?
- simonw 1y ago
  Yeah that's a bad look. If I have an API key visible in my code does that get packaged up as a "prompt" automatically? Could it be spat out to some other user of a model in the future? (I assume that there's a reason that wouldn't happen, but it would be nice to know what that reason is.)
  - isjustintime 1y ago
    I'm also interested in the details on how this works in practice. I know that there was a front page post a few weeks ago about how Cursor worked, and there was a short blurb about how sets of security prompts told the LLM to not do things like hard code API keys, but nothing on the training side.
  - Havoc 1y ago
    I wonder how hard it is to fish the keys out of the model weights later with prompting . Presumably possible to literally brute force it by giving it the first couple chars and maybe an env variable name and asking it to complete it
- blibble 1y ago
  it's the reason they bought it...
- Workaccount2 1y ago
  Gemini doesn't use paid API prompts for training.[1] I believe its just for free usage and the web app. [1]https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/pricing https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/pricing
dockercompost 1y ago
This is a welcome change. It feels bad when your 250 line doc eats up 3 credits just being read and analyzed.
Animats 1y ago
Could someone boil this down to "xx% price increase", please.
- tomschwiha 1y ago
  As far as I understand it's No increase but an update.
elashri 1y ago
I was a user on one of their pro plans with some discount. I remember getting confused between the two tokens limits (flow action and the other one). I am puzzled now trying to figure out if the change corresponds to effective decrease or increase of the pricing. They eliminated the flow action now. To be honest I think it might be that I couldn't understand the change. The only thing I notice is that for 250 additional credit you pay $10 and at this point itis cheaper and better to get another subscription for $15 which will give you another 500 instead of $20. That is if you think you will need this number.
- rohanphadte 1y ago
  The previous two token limits were: user prompt credits (500) flow actions credits (1500) For power users, flow actions would deplete much more quickly (every time the LLM analyzed a file, edited, etc), so Windsurf removed the flow action limit, so you're only getting charged for 500 messages to the AI, which is strictly better for the user.
SquareWheel 1y ago
I tried Windsurf for the first time last week, and I had pretty mixed results. On the positive side, sometimes the tool would figure out exactly what I was doing, and it truly helped me. This was especially the case when when performing a repetitive action, like renaming something, or making the same change across multiple related files. Most of the time though, it just got in the way. I'd press tab to indent a line, and it'd instead jump half-way down the file to delete some random code instead. On more than one occasion I'd by typing happily, and I'd see it had gone off and completely mangled some unrelated section without my noticing. I felt like I needed to be extremely attentive when reviewing commits to make sure nothing was astray. Most of its suggestions seemed hyper-fixated on changing my indent levels, adding braces where they weren't supposed to go, or deleting random comments. I also found it broke common shortcuts, like tab (as above), and ctrl+delete. The editor experience also felt visually very noisy. It was constantly popping up overlays, highlighting things, and generally distracting me while I was trying to write code. I really wished for a "please shut up" button. The chat feature also seemed iffy. It was actually able to identify one bug for me, though many of the times I'd ask it to investigate something, it'd get stuck scanning through files endlessly until it just terminated the task with no output. I was using the unlimited GPT-4.1 model, so maybe I needed to switch to a model with more context length? I would have expected some kind of error, at least. So I don't know. Is anyone else having this experience with Windsurf? Am I just "holding it wrong"? I see people being pretty impressed with this and Cursor, but it hasn't clicked for me yet. How do you get it to behave right?
- mediaman 1y ago
  I find Cursor annoying too, with dumb suggestions getting in the way of my attempts to tab-indent. They should make shift-tab the default way to accept its suggestion, instead of tab, or at least let shift-tab indent without accepting anything if they really want to keep tab as default autocomplete.
- jawns 1y ago
  I find it's very model-dependent. You would think that the more powerful models would work the best, but that hasn't been the case for me. Claude Sonnet tends to do the best job of understanding my intent and not screwing things up. I've also found that test-driven development is even more critical for these tools than for human devs. Fortunately, it's also far less of a chore.
braza 1y ago
Honest question: what does it mean this new pricing that every product has today in terms of “credits”. Sounds quite apache given the fact that you will need to track utilisation all the time for something like prompting. Does someone has any insight on why the old flat pricing or utilisation prices are not in those new AI products where we have this abstract concept as credit?
- ariejan 1y ago
  With Windsurf I'm able to pick any of the premium language models. I.e. Claude 3.7 Sonnet costs 1 credit / prompt, whereas the thinking model costs 1.25 credits, and o3 costs a whopping 7.5 credits. It's simply passing on the cost of respective model's costs, I think. I can image it's hard to come up with an affordable / interesting flat rate _and_ support all those differently priced models.
Jcampuzano2 1y ago
With all the new news about Windsurf and it being thrown into the spotlight, the allure of the lower price than Cursor is definitely there. But does it actually work on par or better? Anybody use Windsurf as their daily driver and have experience with other editors who can chime in, for those of us who are considering it as an alternative?
sunaookami 1y ago
How does Windsurf compare to Cursor? Does anybody have enough experience with both? I'm only using Cursor right now but it seems Windsurf is now a bit cheaper?
- Abde-Notte 1y ago
  i’ve used both a bit. cursor has more features and feels more polished, but windsurf is faster and cheaper. windsurf also has a cleaner UI. if you don’t need all the extra stuff in cursor, windsurf’s a pretty solid option.
- tartieret 1y ago
  we have standardized on windsurf in my company. Cursor was part of the review but Windsurf has better support for dev containers and development on WSL, which most of our developers use. So beyond the actual AI part, there are some surprisingly rough edges with Cursor (using it with WSL is super hacky)
- CSMastermind 1y ago
  I constantly evaluate both because I need to stay on top of dev tooling for my job. Cursor always felt like a chat interface jammed into an IDE that was getting in my way. Copy-pasting from the web interfaces of chatgpt, gemini, claude, etc. was equally, if not more, effective than trying to use cursor for me. Windsurf however did boost my productivity beyond what those web interfaces would do. It seemed much better at working on the command line, actually doing all the stuff around software that wasn't just writing the code. Personally I haven't rolled it out to my teams because of their pricing model but I do think it's worth using (just not with the way they're pricing it).
kmeisthax 1y ago
Solely from reading the headline, I'm going to assume "update" means "price increase". I'm going to read the rest of the article before continuing the comment. Alright, I'm back, this sounds like one of the rare times in which a pricing "update" is actually an update and not just a disguised increase. But I'm also not a Windsurf user, so let me jump through some of the comments and double-check that I didn't get hoodwinked. ...and the comments seem pretty positive, at least regarding the pricing. So I think this is actually one of those few times "update" means "update".
- axiosgunnar 1y ago
  [dead]
amiantos 1y ago
Cursor and Windsurf pricing really turned me off. I prefer Claude Code's direct API costs, because it feels more quantifiable to me cost wise. I can load up Claude Code, implement a feature, and close it, and I get a solid dollar value of how much that cost me. It makes it easier for me to mentally write off the low cost of wasteful requests when the AI gets something wrong or starts to spin its wheels. With Cursor/Windsurf, you make requests, your allowed credit quantity ticks down (which creates anxiety about running out), and you're trying to do some mental math to figure out how those requests that actually cost you. It feels like a method to obfuscate the real cost to the user and also create an incentive for the user to not use the product very much because of the rapidly approaching limits during a focus/flow coding session. I spent about an hour using Cursor Pro and had used up over 30% of my monthly credits on something relatively small, which made me realize their $20/mo plan likely was not going to meet my needs and how much it would really cost me seemed like an unanswerable question. I just don't like it as a customer and it makes me very suspicious of the business model as a result. I spent about $50 on a week with Claude Code, and could easily spend more I bet. The idea that Cursor and Windsurf are suggesting a $20/mo plan could be a good fit for someone like me, in the face of that $50 in one week figure, further illustrates that there is something that doesn't quite match up with these 'credit' based billing systems.
- bogtog 1y ago
  > I spent about an hour using Cursor Pro and had used up over 30% of my monthly credits Sorry, but how is this possible? They give 500 credits in a month for the "premium" queries. I don't even think I'd be able to ask more than one question per minute even with tiny requests. I haven't tried the Agent mode. Does that burn through queries?
  - amiantos 1y ago
    I had to do a little digging to respond to this properly. I was on the "Pro Trial" where you get 150 premium requests and I had very quickly used 34 for them, which admittedly is 22% and not 30%. Their pricing page says that the Free plan includes "Pro two-week trial", but they do not explain that on the pro trial you only get 150 premium requests and that on the real Pro plan you get 500 premium requests. So you're correct to be skeptical, I did not use 30% of 500 requests on the Pro plan. I used 22% of the 150 requests you get on the Trial Pro plan. And yes, I think the agent mode can burn through credits pretty quickly.
cirrus3 1y ago
Anything the requires me to use a different IDE is a non-starter for me. I can imagine it is a lot easier to develop these things as a custom version of VSCode instead of plugins/extensions for a handful of the popular existing IDEs, but is that really a good long term plan? Is the future going to be littered with a bunch of one-off custom IDEs? Does anyone want that future?
- ramesh31 1y ago
  >Anything the requires me to use a different IDE is a non-starter for me. Windsurf is, ultimately, just an IDE extension. They shipped a forked VSCode with their branding for... some reason. But the extension is available in practically every IDE/editor.
  - newlisp 1y ago
    The reason for forking is the restrictions of the vscode API, so no, the extensions and the fork are not the same.
    - ramesh31 1y ago
      The extension seems to provide the exact same functionality, so I'm not sure what's really needed there. In fact, I have had better results with the Jetbrains and Sublime extensions than the Windsurf editor.
  - hyperhopper 1y ago
    Yeah, using VSCode is a different IDE Why do you assume everybody uses that? If the product can't be used with the infinitely hackable emacs or vim, that's a shortcoming of the product.
    - ako 1y ago
      In the end that’s just a business decision: how much revenue can you expect from emacs/vim users versus users that prefer it integrated in an easily installable ide? I would choose to ignore the vim users expecting more revenue from a standalone IDE. You can’t cater for everyone.
ramesh31 1y ago
As a daily full time Windsurf user, I can emphatically state that it is strictly inferior to multiple free/open source tools like Cline and Claude Code that work directly with Anthropic/OpenAI keys, no "flow credits" involved. Good on them for catching the enterprise market, but that's about all it is; an enterprise friendly wrapper for a second-rate VSCode extension.
- victorbjorklund 1y ago
  Claude code is neither free nor open source.
  - ramesh31 1y ago
    >Claude code is neither free nor open source. "Free" as in no "middleman accounts" or other nonsense. You pay the base token rate directly to Anthropic, and that's it.
    - Ylpertnodi 1y ago
      >"Free" as in [.....y]ou pay [...] Possibly the worst comment I've ever read on this site. And, by 'possibly', I mean 'most definitely'.
      - ramesh31 1y ago
        There's no such thing as "completely free" when it comes to LLM usage. Everyone knows that. But there are two different tiers of tools now. The "free" ones that use API keys directly, and the premium ones like Windsurf that operate on their own credit system. So yes, "free" is a meaningfully useful distinction here, in that you incur no cost for the tool itself.
        lukev 1y ago
        I mean there are definitely systems that let you hook up to a locally executed LLM, or an arbitrary cloud hosted one that you might either host yourself or pay for separately. So yeah I'd say those are "completely free."
geor9e 1y ago
I really dislike credits based pricing. It just doesn't feel good. Cursor $20/mo plan lasts me about a week before it becomes unusably slow. I'm fine with slow requests, but recently it will literally not even begin a response for over a minute. Really hoping costs come down or someone figures out a real unlimited plan for these agent coders.
CSMastermind 1y ago
Their pricing is the main reason I don't use Windsurf in spite of finding it to be the only tool that really boosted my productivity beyond what the LLM chat interfaces do already. This really doesn't seem to make it better. You have a monthly license cost, I get that, but then you're shoehorning in this whole credits system (presumably so they can make money on that too) instead of just charging me pass-through costs for the API calls. As long as they're doing the credits system I'm not using the tool.
sireat 1y ago
Can Windsurf support project based context? In other words can you throw in some extra docs and code samples to get improved suggestions? I have a project where the language - Lua should be cakewalk for most models but domain specific APIs are not in any LLM training set. So my idea would be to throw in API docs and some illustrative code samples as context in a project. Maybe I could even throw in some typical architecture docs? PS Been constantly using VS Code Copilot on multiple languages since technical preview in the summer of 2001

127 points by mefengl 1y ago

As an avid Windsurf user, I support this simplification of the pricing. In nearly all cases, I don't care how many individual steps the model needs to take to accomplish the task. I just want it to do what I've asked it to do. It is curious, however, that this move is coinciding with rumors of OpenAI attempting to acquire Windsurf. If an acquisition were imminent, it would seem strange to mess with the pricing structure soon beforehand.

jelling 1y ago
Clarifying the pricing would make it easier to value the revenue from current and future users. And naturally they rounded up to leave themselves literal margin for error.
Jcampuzano2 1y ago
Curious - what makes you pick, windsurf over other editors. I currently use Cursor but have seen more news about windsurf, especially after the recent news with respect to OpenAI. Do you find it better, worse, etc. And are there things it does better for you than other editors.
- leobuskin 1y ago
  I don't like the "vibe" term nowadays, but when you mix two pretty abstract domains (AI and development), it's all about vibes and aura. Some model/agent works perfectly for one of us (let's keep in mind, we have a bunch of factors, from language to the complexity of the implementation), and does everything wrong for others. You just can't measure it properly, outside of experiments and building your own assessment within your context. All the recommendations here just don't work. "Try all of them, stick with one for a while, don't forget to retry others on a regular basis" - that's my moto today. Cursor (as an agent/orchestrator) didn't work for me at all (Python, low-level, no frameworks, not webdev). I fell in love with Windsurf ($60 tier initially). Switched entirely to JetBrains AI a few days ago (vscode is not friendly for me, PyCharm rocks), so happy about the price drop.
- TiredOfLife 1y ago
  For me it was the awesome and more important free autocomplete that i used when it was still called codeium

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

croes 1y ago

Related? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43708725 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43708725

dang 1y ago
Thanks! Macroexpanded: Why is OpenAI buying Windsurf? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43743993 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43743993 - April 2025 (218 comments) OpenAI looked at buying Cursor creator before turning to Windsurf - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43716856 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43716856 - April 2025 (115 comments) OpenAI in Talks to Buy Windsurf for About $3B - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43708725 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43708725 - April 2025 (44 comments)

rudedogg 1y ago

> To train, develop, and improve the artificial intelligence, machine learning, and models that we use to support our Services. We may use your Log and Usage Information and Prompts and Outputs Information for this purpose. https://windsurf.com/privacy-policy https://windsurf.com/privacy-policy Am I the only one bothered by this? Same with Gemini Advanced (paid) training on your prompts. It feels like I’m paying with money, but also handing over my entire codebase to improve your products. Can’t you do synthetic training data generation at this point, along with the massive amount of Q/A online to not require this?

simonw 1y ago
Yeah that's a bad look. If I have an API key visible in my code does that get packaged up as a "prompt" automatically? Could it be spat out to some other user of a model in the future? (I assume that there's a reason that wouldn't happen, but it would be nice to know what that reason is.)
- isjustintime 1y ago
  I'm also interested in the details on how this works in practice. I know that there was a front page post a few weeks ago about how Cursor worked, and there was a short blurb about how sets of security prompts told the LLM to not do things like hard code API keys, but nothing on the training side.
- Havoc 1y ago
  I wonder how hard it is to fish the keys out of the model weights later with prompting . Presumably possible to literally brute force it by giving it the first couple chars and maybe an env variable name and asking it to complete it
blibble 1y ago
it's the reason they bought it...
Workaccount2 1y ago
Gemini doesn't use paid API prompts for training.[1] I believe its just for free usage and the web app. [1]https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/pricing https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/pricing

dockercompost 1y ago

This is a welcome change. It feels bad when your 250 line doc eats up 3 credits just being read and analyzed.

Animats 1y ago

Could someone boil this down to "xx% price increase", please.

tomschwiha 1y ago
As far as I understand it's No increase but an update.

elashri 1y ago

I was a user on one of their pro plans with some discount. I remember getting confused between the two tokens limits (flow action and the other one). I am puzzled now trying to figure out if the change corresponds to effective decrease or increase of the pricing. They eliminated the flow action now. To be honest I think it might be that I couldn't understand the change. The only thing I notice is that for 250 additional credit you pay $10 and at this point itis cheaper and better to get another subscription for $15 which will give you another 500 instead of $20. That is if you think you will need this number.

rohanphadte 1y ago
The previous two token limits were: user prompt credits (500) flow actions credits (1500) For power users, flow actions would deplete much more quickly (every time the LLM analyzed a file, edited, etc), so Windsurf removed the flow action limit, so you're only getting charged for 500 messages to the AI, which is strictly better for the user.

SquareWheel 1y ago

I tried Windsurf for the first time last week, and I had pretty mixed results. On the positive side, sometimes the tool would figure out exactly what I was doing, and it truly helped me. This was especially the case when when performing a repetitive action, like renaming something, or making the same change across multiple related files. Most of the time though, it just got in the way. I'd press tab to indent a line, and it'd instead jump half-way down the file to delete some random code instead. On more than one occasion I'd by typing happily, and I'd see it had gone off and completely mangled some unrelated section without my noticing. I felt like I needed to be extremely attentive when reviewing commits to make sure nothing was astray. Most of its suggestions seemed hyper-fixated on changing my indent levels, adding braces where they weren't supposed to go, or deleting random comments. I also found it broke common shortcuts, like tab (as above), and ctrl+delete. The editor experience also felt visually very noisy. It was constantly popping up overlays, highlighting things, and generally distracting me while I was trying to write code. I really wished for a "please shut up" button. The chat feature also seemed iffy. It was actually able to identify one bug for me, though many of the times I'd ask it to investigate something, it'd get stuck scanning through files endlessly until it just terminated the task with no output. I was using the unlimited GPT-4.1 model, so maybe I needed to switch to a model with more context length? I would have expected some kind of error, at least. So I don't know. Is anyone else having this experience with Windsurf? Am I just "holding it wrong"? I see people being pretty impressed with this and Cursor, but it hasn't clicked for me yet. How do you get it to behave right?

mediaman 1y ago
I find Cursor annoying too, with dumb suggestions getting in the way of my attempts to tab-indent. They should make shift-tab the default way to accept its suggestion, instead of tab, or at least let shift-tab indent without accepting anything if they really want to keep tab as default autocomplete.
jawns 1y ago
I find it's very model-dependent. You would think that the more powerful models would work the best, but that hasn't been the case for me. Claude Sonnet tends to do the best job of understanding my intent and not screwing things up. I've also found that test-driven development is even more critical for these tools than for human devs. Fortunately, it's also far less of a chore.

braza 1y ago

Honest question: what does it mean this new pricing that every product has today in terms of “credits”. Sounds quite apache given the fact that you will need to track utilisation all the time for something like prompting. Does someone has any insight on why the old flat pricing or utilisation prices are not in those new AI products where we have this abstract concept as credit?

ariejan 1y ago
With Windsurf I'm able to pick any of the premium language models. I.e. Claude 3.7 Sonnet costs 1 credit / prompt, whereas the thinking model costs 1.25 credits, and o3 costs a whopping 7.5 credits. It's simply passing on the cost of respective model's costs, I think. I can image it's hard to come up with an affordable / interesting flat rate _and_ support all those differently priced models.

Jcampuzano2 1y ago

With all the new news about Windsurf and it being thrown into the spotlight, the allure of the lower price than Cursor is definitely there. But does it actually work on par or better? Anybody use Windsurf as their daily driver and have experience with other editors who can chime in, for those of us who are considering it as an alternative?

sunaookami 1y ago

How does Windsurf compare to Cursor? Does anybody have enough experience with both? I'm only using Cursor right now but it seems Windsurf is now a bit cheaper?

Abde-Notte 1y ago
i’ve used both a bit. cursor has more features and feels more polished, but windsurf is faster and cheaper. windsurf also has a cleaner UI. if you don’t need all the extra stuff in cursor, windsurf’s a pretty solid option.
tartieret 1y ago
we have standardized on windsurf in my company. Cursor was part of the review but Windsurf has better support for dev containers and development on WSL, which most of our developers use. So beyond the actual AI part, there are some surprisingly rough edges with Cursor (using it with WSL is super hacky)
CSMastermind 1y ago
I constantly evaluate both because I need to stay on top of dev tooling for my job. Cursor always felt like a chat interface jammed into an IDE that was getting in my way. Copy-pasting from the web interfaces of chatgpt, gemini, claude, etc. was equally, if not more, effective than trying to use cursor for me. Windsurf however did boost my productivity beyond what those web interfaces would do. It seemed much better at working on the command line, actually doing all the stuff around software that wasn't just writing the code. Personally I haven't rolled it out to my teams because of their pricing model but I do think it's worth using (just not with the way they're pricing it).

kmeisthax 1y ago

Solely from reading the headline, I'm going to assume "update" means "price increase". I'm going to read the rest of the article before continuing the comment. Alright, I'm back, this sounds like one of the rare times in which a pricing "update" is actually an update and not just a disguised increase. But I'm also not a Windsurf user, so let me jump through some of the comments and double-check that I didn't get hoodwinked. ...and the comments seem pretty positive, at least regarding the pricing. So I think this is actually one of those few times "update" means "update".

axiosgunnar 1y ago
[dead]

amiantos 1y ago

Cursor and Windsurf pricing really turned me off. I prefer Claude Code's direct API costs, because it feels more quantifiable to me cost wise. I can load up Claude Code, implement a feature, and close it, and I get a solid dollar value of how much that cost me. It makes it easier for me to mentally write off the low cost of wasteful requests when the AI gets something wrong or starts to spin its wheels. With Cursor/Windsurf, you make requests, your allowed credit quantity ticks down (which creates anxiety about running out), and you're trying to do some mental math to figure out how those requests that actually cost you. It feels like a method to obfuscate the real cost to the user and also create an incentive for the user to not use the product very much because of the rapidly approaching limits during a focus/flow coding session. I spent about an hour using Cursor Pro and had used up over 30% of my monthly credits on something relatively small, which made me realize their $20/mo plan likely was not going to meet my needs and how much it would really cost me seemed like an unanswerable question. I just don't like it as a customer and it makes me very suspicious of the business model as a result. I spent about $50 on a week with Claude Code, and could easily spend more I bet. The idea that Cursor and Windsurf are suggesting a $20/mo plan could be a good fit for someone like me, in the face of that $50 in one week figure, further illustrates that there is something that doesn't quite match up with these 'credit' based billing systems.

bogtog 1y ago
> I spent about an hour using Cursor Pro and had used up over 30% of my monthly credits Sorry, but how is this possible? They give 500 credits in a month for the "premium" queries. I don't even think I'd be able to ask more than one question per minute even with tiny requests. I haven't tried the Agent mode. Does that burn through queries?
- amiantos 1y ago
  I had to do a little digging to respond to this properly. I was on the "Pro Trial" where you get 150 premium requests and I had very quickly used 34 for them, which admittedly is 22% and not 30%. Their pricing page says that the Free plan includes "Pro two-week trial", but they do not explain that on the pro trial you only get 150 premium requests and that on the real Pro plan you get 500 premium requests. So you're correct to be skeptical, I did not use 30% of 500 requests on the Pro plan. I used 22% of the 150 requests you get on the Trial Pro plan. And yes, I think the agent mode can burn through credits pretty quickly.

cirrus3 1y ago

Anything the requires me to use a different IDE is a non-starter for me. I can imagine it is a lot easier to develop these things as a custom version of VSCode instead of plugins/extensions for a handful of the popular existing IDEs, but is that really a good long term plan? Is the future going to be littered with a bunch of one-off custom IDEs? Does anyone want that future?

ramesh31 1y ago
>Anything the requires me to use a different IDE is a non-starter for me. Windsurf is, ultimately, just an IDE extension. They shipped a forked VSCode with their branding for... some reason. But the extension is available in practically every IDE/editor.
- newlisp 1y ago
  The reason for forking is the restrictions of the vscode API, so no, the extensions and the fork are not the same.
  - ramesh31 1y ago
    The extension seems to provide the exact same functionality, so I'm not sure what's really needed there. In fact, I have had better results with the Jetbrains and Sublime extensions than the Windsurf editor.
- hyperhopper 1y ago
  Yeah, using VSCode is a different IDE Why do you assume everybody uses that? If the product can't be used with the infinitely hackable emacs or vim, that's a shortcoming of the product.
  - ako 1y ago
    In the end that’s just a business decision: how much revenue can you expect from emacs/vim users versus users that prefer it integrated in an easily installable ide? I would choose to ignore the vim users expecting more revenue from a standalone IDE. You can’t cater for everyone.

ramesh31 1y ago

As a daily full time Windsurf user, I can emphatically state that it is strictly inferior to multiple free/open source tools like Cline and Claude Code that work directly with Anthropic/OpenAI keys, no "flow credits" involved. Good on them for catching the enterprise market, but that's about all it is; an enterprise friendly wrapper for a second-rate VSCode extension.

victorbjorklund 1y ago
Claude code is neither free nor open source.
- ramesh31 1y ago
  >Claude code is neither free nor open source. "Free" as in no "middleman accounts" or other nonsense. You pay the base token rate directly to Anthropic, and that's it.
  - Ylpertnodi 1y ago
    >"Free" as in [.....y]ou pay [...] Possibly the worst comment I've ever read on this site. And, by 'possibly', I mean 'most definitely'.
    - ramesh31 1y ago
      There's no such thing as "completely free" when it comes to LLM usage. Everyone knows that. But there are two different tiers of tools now. The "free" ones that use API keys directly, and the premium ones like Windsurf that operate on their own credit system. So yes, "free" is a meaningfully useful distinction here, in that you incur no cost for the tool itself.
      - lukev 1y ago
        I mean there are definitely systems that let you hook up to a locally executed LLM, or an arbitrary cloud hosted one that you might either host yourself or pay for separately. So yeah I'd say those are "completely free."

geor9e 1y ago

I really dislike credits based pricing. It just doesn't feel good. Cursor $20/mo plan lasts me about a week before it becomes unusably slow. I'm fine with slow requests, but recently it will literally not even begin a response for over a minute. Really hoping costs come down or someone figures out a real unlimited plan for these agent coders.

CSMastermind 1y ago

Their pricing is the main reason I don't use Windsurf in spite of finding it to be the only tool that really boosted my productivity beyond what the LLM chat interfaces do already. This really doesn't seem to make it better. You have a monthly license cost, I get that, but then you're shoehorning in this whole credits system (presumably so they can make money on that too) instead of just charging me pass-through costs for the API calls. As long as they're doing the credits system I'm not using the tool.

sireat 1y ago

Can Windsurf support project based context? In other words can you throw in some extra docs and code samples to get improved suggestions? I have a project where the language - Lua should be cakewalk for most models but domain specific APIs are not in any LLM training set. So my idea would be to throw in API docs and some illustrative code samples as context in a project. Maybe I could even throw in some typical architecture docs? PS Been constantly using VS Code Copilot on multiple languages since technical preview in the summer of 2001