Is Windsurf the same thing as Devin now?
On the pricing page, effectively yes. windsurf.com/pricing redirects to devin.ai/pricing, and the plan table there is Devin's, Free, Pro at $20 per month, Max at $200 per month, Teams at $80 /month plus $40/mo per full dev seat. The editor appears on that table as "Devin Desktop", and the free tier's headline capability is "Unlimited Devin Desktop Tab". Cognition acquired Windsurf and is now selling both under one plan ladder. Read on 2026-08-14.
Is Cursor or Windsurf cheaper?
The same, at the tier most people buy: $20 a month each. They diverge above and below it. Windsurf's next step up is Max at $200 per month; Cursor's Individual card names Pro, Pro+ and Ultra and prints one price, $20 / mo., for all three, read with a fetch and again in a real browser, no second figure is on the page at load. On teams, Cursor is $40 / user / mo. flat; Cognition charges $80 /month for the team plan plus $40/mo per full dev seat.
What happens when I run out of usage?
Both sell you more rather than cutting you off, and neither headline price is therefore the bill. Cursor: "Every plan includes a set amount of model usage. On-demand usage allows you to continue using models after your included amount is consumed, billed in arrears." Cognition: "If you do go beyond your included usage on a paid plan, you can purchase extra usage which is consumed at API pricing." Which is cheaper depends entirely on the models you drive and how hard.
Which one should I pick for a team?
Cursor, on published terms, unless cloud agents are the point. Cursor Teams is $40 / user / mo. and the card lists SAML/OIDC SSO, centralised billing, team-wide privacy mode and agentic code review at that price. Cognition's Teams tier is $80 /month for the plan plus $40/mo per full dev seat, so it costs more for the first developer and roughly the same per developer after that, and what the extra buys is Devin Cloud rather than administration.
What is the cheapest alternative to Cursor?
Free ones, and they are real products rather than trials: Zed's Personal plan is "$0 forever" with "Unlimited use with your API keys or external agents like Claude Agent, Codex CLI, and more", and Cline is free for individual developers with no subscription at all. Of the paid tiers, GitHub Copilot Pro at $ 10 USD per user / month is the cheapest, half Cursor's $20 / mo. On both of the free ones you still pay for model inference, the saving is the subscription, not the tokens.
Which Cursor alternative is best for a team?
Augment Code on price, GitHub Copilot on procurement. Augment Standard is "$20 /month flat, no per-seat charge" with "up to 50 seats included", the only non-per-seat price in this comparison, against Cursor Teams at $40 / user / mo. for a Standard seat. That is cheaper from the first developer, and Augment Business is the same shape at $100 /month. Copilot is cheaper per head and already inside a GitHub bill, but its own plans page carries only the individual tiers; the business ones sit behind a "For businesses" tab and are not on the page's text at all.
Do any of these let me use my own API key?
Zed and Cline, explicitly. Zed's free plan says "Unlimited use with your API keys or external agents", and on Business "you can use Zed-hosted AI at standard usage rates, or bring your own API keys from Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, and others - in which case spend goes directly to your provider". Cline lists "Purchase and Model Inference at Cost or BYOK" and names Anthropic, Gemini, OpenAI, OpenRouter, AWS Bedrock, GCP Vertex and others. Cursor, Windsurf, Copilot and Claude Code sell you bundled usage instead.
Is Windsurf still a Cursor alternative?
It is, but not the one people mean. windsurf.com/pricing redirects to devin.ai/pricing and the plan table there is Cognition's Devin, with the editor listed as "Devin Desktop". So switching to Windsurf today means buying into Devin's plan ladder, Free, Pro at $20 per month, Max at $200 per month, and what the money buys is cloud agents rather than a better editor. Read on 2026-08-14. This is the exact class of change ToolDrift exists to catch: the comparison articles still in circulation were written before it.
What is the cheapest AI coding tool?
Two of them cost nothing and are complete products rather than trials: Zed Personal is "$0 forever" with unlimited use of your own API keys, and Cline is free for individual developers with "no subscriptions, no vendor lock-in". On both you still pay for model inference. Of the subscriptions, GitHub Copilot Pro is the cheapest at $ 10 USD per user / month; Cursor, Windsurf and Claude Code all sit at $20 a month; Augment Code starts at $20 /month flat and has no free tier at all.
Do these prices include the AI usage?
Only up to a point, and this is the row that decides the real bill. Every paid plan here is an allowance. Cursor: "On-demand usage allows you to continue using models after your included amount is consumed, billed in arrears." Cognition: "purchase extra usage which is consumed at API pricing." Copilot: GitHub AI Credits, $15 a month on Pro, $70 on Pro+, $200 on Max. Zed: "Usage-based billing beyond $5". Augment: "Top-ups, pay as you go". Claude Code is the one that publishes no per-unit rate at all, its tiers are multiples of one another, with "Usage limits apply" as the footnote.
Which AI coding tool is best for a team?
It depends on whether you are buying seats or capability. On seats, Augment Code is the outlier: "$20 /month flat, no per-seat charge" for up to 50 seats, with Business the same shape at $100 /month, against Cursor Teams at $40 / user / mo. for a Standard seat,, Zed Business at $30 per seat, per month and Claude Code Team at $25 per seat if billed monthly. On capability, Cursor's Teams card is the one that lists SAML/OIDC SSO, pooled billing, team-wide privacy mode and agentic code review at its published price. GitHub Copilot may well be cheapest of all for a team, but its own plans page does not say, the business tiers sit behind a tab and are not in the page's text.
Why do these comparisons keep going out of date?
Because the tools change faster than anyone rewrites the articles, and the changes are structural rather than cosmetic. The clearest example on this table today: windsurf.com/pricing redirects to devin.ai/pricing, and what it serves is Cognition's Devin plan ladder with the editor listed as "Devin Desktop". Every comparison of Cursor and Windsurf written before that is describing a product that is no longer sold in that form. ToolDrift reads each vendor's own pages every night and records what moved, which is why each pair here is a generated page rather than an article.