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An update to our pricing

windsurf.com

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Re: An update to our pricing

#71

Post by kaashif »

janpaul123 wrote: post #58
ricksunny wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does the psychologist in you say "that's hella stressful", e.g. Stressful for who? What is the source of their stress?

Seeing the $ every time I do something, even if it's $0.50, can be a little stressful. We should have an option to hide it per-request and just show a progress bar for the current topup.

I find a progress bar for a top up much more stressful than just a counter of how much I've spent.

Counting down to a deadline vs counting up to nothing.

If it costs money and spending money is stressful, there has to be a cost somewhere, we can't remove the stress entirely.

Re: An update to our pricing

#72

Post by tartieret »

sunaookami wrote: post #23

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?

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)

Re: An update to our pricing

#73

Post by moshegramovsky »

freedomben wrote: post #70
moshegramovsky wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm paying $30/month for Gemini. It's worth every damn penny and then some and then some and then some. It's absolutely amazing at code reviews. Much more thorough than a human code reviewer, including me. It humbles me sometimes, which is good. Unless you can't use Google products, I'd seriously give it a try. Now, I do still use ChatGPT sometimes. It recently helped me find a very simple solution to a pretty obscur…

How do you get Gemini to do a code review? Do you just paste the code into the web UI?

It depends. For a class or a function, yes, I copy and paste.

When I want a review of a larger project I am working on (2500 classes), I concatenate the chunks of the codebase into a .txt file and upload it to Gemini.

Then we go over it.

I've even uploaded the entire codebase and asked it to write documentation and it did an excellent job providing a framework for me.

Re: An update to our pricing

#74

Post by runako »

adamgordonbell wrote: post #54
amiantos wrote: post #31

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/W…

I use windsurf, have the largest plan and still need to top up quite a bit. So for me it has a price per task, sort of, because you are topping it up by paying another 10 dollars at a time as you run out. The plans aren't the right size for professional work, but maybe they wanted to keep the price points low?

> The plans aren't the right size for professional work

I think there is a fundamental pricing misalignment between products that seek to do professional work being sold to people who want them to help with professional work.

Another way: their pricing will likely make much more sense for a person whose coding skill is closer to zero (& who doesn't want to learn) than it will for a person who is looking for an AI assistant.

Re: An update to our pricing

#75

Post by replwoacause »

moshegramovsky wrote: post #73
freedomben wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you get Gemini to do a code review? Do you just paste the code into the web UI?

It depends. For a class or a function, yes, I copy and paste. When I want a review of a larger project I am working on (2500 classes), I concatenate the chunks of the codebase into a .txt file and upload it to Gemini. Then we go over it. I've even uploaded the entire codebase and asked it to write documentation and it did an excellent job providing a framework for me.

It seems most people aren’t worried about handing their code over to LLMs. Why is that? Isn’t there a concern that they will just train on your code? What if you’re trying to build a business, is there a fear that your idea or implementation will just get stolen or absorbed into the LLM and spit out into someone else’s code base? Or do people just not care anymore because code is so trivial to generate that it’s not worth very much?

Re: An update to our pricing

#76

Post by lukev »

ramesh31 wrote: post #65
Ylpertnodi wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"Free" as in [.....y]ou pay [...] Possibly the worst comment I've ever read on this site. And, by 'possibly', I mean 'most definitely'.

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.

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."

Re: An update to our pricing

#77

Post by ayi »

rudedogg wrote: post #6

> 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 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 ent…

Looks like the correct page is this: https://windsurf.com/security

It says:

Zero-data retention mode is the default for any user on a team or enterprise plan and can be enabled by any individual from their profile page.

With zero-data retention mode enabled, code data is not persisted at our servers or by any of our subprocessors. The code data is still visible to our servers in memory for the lifetime of the request, and may exist for a slightly longer period (on the order of minutes to hours) for prompt caching The code data submitted by zero-data retention mode users will never be trained on. Again, zero-data retention mode is on by default for teams and enterprise customers.

Re: An update to our pricing

#78

Post by CSMastermind »

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.

Re: An update to our pricing

#79

Post by indigodaddy »

moshegramovsky wrote: post #73
freedomben wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you get Gemini to do a code review? Do you just paste the code into the web UI?

It depends. For a class or a function, yes, I copy and paste. When I want a review of a larger project I am working on (2500 classes), I concatenate the chunks of the codebase into a .txt file and upload it to Gemini. Then we go over it. I've even uploaded the entire codebase and asked it to write documentation and it did an excellent job providing a framework for me.

"concatenate the chunks of the codebase into a .txt file"

I think simonw has a tool that also does something like this? Edit- found it:

https://github.com/simonw/files-to-prompt

Re: An update to our pricing

#80

Post by CSMastermind »

sunaookami wrote: post #23

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?

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).

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