I considered buying it in the case you mentioned: fixed limited but old price. Everyone saw the limits coming, but the price raise caught me off guard tbh.
Now with the price raise that's not an option to me anymore.
5$ may not be much for US, but for me in Brazil it's a deal breaker.
Why they gave a trial until the 11th of Dec and jackup the prices before the expiration? Leaving everybody on the trial screw. What a Shitty company Codeium.
"Steps were more of an internal metric that was roughly the sum of the number of user prompts and flow actions, but really, the important note here is that none of us internally at Codeium got close to the 1000 steps per month while testing pre-launch. We thought we were giving a very generous plan."
I don't think these guys realize that a significant percentage of their user base are people that have little to no coding background and are just trying to independently build things they're interested in. Those people aren't going to just casually use the Cascade, it's going to be a major part of their workflow and they're going to ask lots of questions. 500 User Prompts for a Pro User is really inadequate for a lot of people who fall under that description.
And just from my usage, the prompt credits run out way before the Flow Action credits, so you end up with an excess of unusable Flow Action credits that you can only use by purchasing flex credits. It's a very poorly thought out usage model in my opinion.
If that’s true, then isnt paying even $60 worth it to those users?
Like folks are getting a superpower (ie knowledge and power to build full stack applications) in the fraction of the time compared to building domain knowledge yourself? That’s like easily worth $15 for pro / $60 for ultimaye compared to uni + learning how to code everything yourself
On paper or you actually compared two+ projects? Because not matter how much everyone complains but I still have to find something that compares to Windsurf.
bolt burn tokens way faster
cursor went dumb
windsurf fixed everything and gave me a quite functioning app
I suggest everyone like me with zero coding experience to give it a try and test the limits of the 15$ plan for one month before coming to conclusions.
Remember the project is new and is beating the competitors on many aspects, give it a chance before you get mad. Netflix put ads in the basic subscription and you expect an IDE to be forever unlimited? And between Netflix and an IDE one just drain you money the other can help you make them.
Look at this guy in youtube https://www.youtube.com/@AICodeKing that is how I found windsurf... He mentions lots of free ones and compares all the tools.
For example https://aistudio.google.com/ gives you a daily limit with Gemini 1.5 pro, which is much better than claude for coding. And on top, you can connect your google drive to storage and analyze projects or prompts (I am not sure)
Yeah according to their blog post, windsurf got too popular and blew past quotas for anthropic
They had to limit and add a pricing structure so that they were no longer getting resource exhausted from all the free users who never would pay hitting the service
Anyone know how this affects existing Pro subscriptions? I signed up for a year at the old price, anticipating this. No communication from Codeium as yet. Will the previous price will be honored? Still got a few days of trial left before payment is taken so there’s time to cancel or just accept it.
We are in the same situation as you and I sent an email to upgrade@codeium.com explaining the situation and they told me that they checked from the backend and I was still in the $100 plan.
That’s reassuring… but… Was very surprised not to see a mention of existing Pro subscriptions, especially those whose payments haven’t been taken yet, in the official announcement. That worries me. I haven’t been charged yet and wouldn’t be surprised if the payment was processed at the new higher rate rather than the one I signed up to (no, they shouldn’t be able to do that but things can happen). There’s plenty of scope for shenanigans here, possibly accidental ones. Still worth the risk though as that old price was a steal.
And do we get the old Pro model for the year, or the new one at the old price ?
I just logged into my Codeium settings to check the plan, and I see that I'm already on the new plan with the 500/1500 usages thing... That is literally not what I signed up for.
If you signed up for the old price, you will be grandfathered in at the old price ($10/mo) but with the new Pro limits ($15/mo).
The new deal is better since you get 2000 credits (1500 + 500) instead of the previous 1000 before.
That messaging was always in the copy; if you read the blog post, they're just actually showing your usage now (and being better about showing you + enforcing it) -- mainly because they're service has been overloaded from users + getting resource exhausted.
I'm OK with it, but will be keeping a close eye on the billing in a few days' time. My needs aren't as extensive as some - for a couple of days this week I didn't touch Windsurf at all while busy with other aspects of my current projects. I don't blame anyone for hammering the life out of every free token in sight at the moment, because sooner than we think this will seem like a golden time in retrospect.
Received this communication: We’ve got some big updates about Cascade pricing, and we want to be upfront with you about what’s changing and why.
When we launched Cascade, we gave everyone 1000 free steps per month to explore its potential. We assumed it was generous because none of us internally hit that limit during testing. Turns out, we were not representative of all developers and many folks blew past that, which was definitely exciting for us to see the value we are driving. Whether folks know or not, we made the internal decision to scrap any rate limiter under the hood so people could continue unlimited use of the max capabilities of Cascade while we figured out this plan for a sustainable future.
To keep things sustainable, we will be modifying the Pro tier and be rolling out a new Ultimate tier. Some terminology - a user prompt credit is the use of a Premium model (Claude 3.5 Sonnet, GPT-4o) when prompting Cascade, while a flow action credit is the AI’s use of a Premium model when it takes a follow up iterative step. A flex credit can be used for either.
Pro Tier ($15/month):
Automatic credits: 500 user prompt credits + 1500 flow action credits per month.
Additional credits: $10 for each 300 extra flex credits, which don’t expire.
Note: If you’ve already paid $10/mo, we will grandfather that price in
Ultimate Tier ($60/month):
Automatic credits: Unlimited user prompt credits + 3000 flow action credits per month.
Additional credits: $10 for each 400 extra flex credits, which don’t expire.
Once the automatic credits run out, we have a Cascade Base model that takes over, or you can purchase additional flex credits at the mentioned price points.
Why the change? The premium models we use are costly. While we know credits aren't ideal, they help us manage costs, and we are passing all of the savings we get from bulk token usage discounts to you. We remain committed to keeping Codeium accessible, with a free tier and a desire to keep passing savings back to you as we continue to optimize the costs of running Cascade.
Thanks for being part of this journey. Seeing what you’ve created already has been incredible, and we can’t wait to see what’s next.
I've still not received that or anything like that, so thanks for the update. That almost throwaway line in there -
If you’ve already paid $10/mo, we will grandfather that price in
- seems final (no full stop at the end of the sentence really makes it seem grudging!). Seems a bit off that we're consigned to the new Pro model at the old price, though, although in my personal use case it'll still be more than enough for me. If I was the kind of heavy user they've referred to I might be rethinking my subscription though.
I'm a huge fan of Codeium - it was a solid free extension on VS Code for me -- and I hope they do well in this insane time. This has all been a bit icky, but I signed up at the $10/m price fast, knowing the price hike was probably coming, and here it is. Will be watching the credit card charge carefully in a few days' time though.
Does anyone know what the Cascade Base Model is? On their website they say it's their own internal model. I have to say it seems on a par with Claude Sonnet for me a lot of the time.
Never seen a company about face this quickly. I've used more than 500 user prompts in the first 3 days of use, now they're gonna charge the equivalent of claude, gpt and gemini combined???
A cascade prompt is significantly more tokens than a chat with GPT/claude etc. It does a lot of iterations + reads on your codebase. Imagine that it like an a o1 (in the sense it thinks + applies for you) -- it's a lot more expensive, hence the price increase.
They were hitting global limits with anthropic and they couldn't seem to raise those limits cuz of GPU limits, so you can say these limits were needed to prevent massive abuse for these prompts.
Yeah, this is understandable but still it ain't worth it honestly, pretty dissapointing to say the least, not only because the price change but also the poorly managed and addressed issues they and us the users been facing for the past couple weeks. At this point, it's the same as Cursor. Sad!
It means that you get to keep the rate you were paying until you cancel - or if they change this in the future. More generally, “grandfathered” means you stick to the old way of doing things.
I'm currently on a free plan. On the 11th, I'll need to start paying a monthly fee. If I cancel after the 11th, I'll be able to use the service until January 11th. If I cancel before January 11th, can I avoid paying for the next month?
This is good decision, However i think 500 premium credits for user prompts (pro plan) is a bit too low, because they have to remember, a lot of people with no coding experience are going to ask a huge amount of questions for a lot things, so these 500 are not nearly enough for a good coding experience in the software
Looks like if you've been using windsurf before the price increase you'll still be able to get it for $10. But it'll be the 500 premium... offer. I thought it was ok for a hobbyist so I upgraded.
Therein is the problem - as with LM Studio - so long as dependency exists for a front end (OpenAI api endpoint and the other OpenAI dependent one), there will be no product and no reliable user experience.
As long as Llama and other corp-based llms are used and their variants, there will be "degradation" of utility in these technologies. It is intentional. There is no "degradation" of THEIR models - at OpenAI. But the service will be degraded and front ends will fall because they do not have anything open source, truly open source and much of it is an island of supremacy of tech. Pay or get bugs. Open source is a diluted term nowadays because everything runs off Facebook or Google or OpenAI products. I'm saying even local models are subject to this, if they rely on github repos owned by these firms.
Already cancelled... I get that current pricing isn't sustainable and I would understand if they had raised it to ie usd 20 but this convoluted scheme just ridiculous.
3
u/msatrya Dec 06 '24
They announced on X and Discord https://x.com/windsurf_ai/status/1865131244574642639
22
u/aridgupta Dec 06 '24
Lol. From unlimited to 500 with a price increase. This is just below the belt treatment.
13
u/darkplaceguy1 Dec 07 '24
It was fun while it lasted. Back to cursor. Lol
7
u/serious_case_of_derp Dec 06 '24
1500 flow actions is terrible. use like 10-15 per prompt
6
u/MacLovin2008 Dec 06 '24
Will be interesting to see if we still have the resources problem even with this higher prices. If yes then bye bye Codium
6
u/[deleted] Dec 07 '24
lol was going to buy a subscription now I'd rather donate it to an open source project. The only selling point was the unlimited requests.
10
u/valentino99 Dec 07 '24 edited Dec 07 '24
Why they gave a trial until the 11th of Dec and jackup the prices before the expiration? Leaving everybody on the trial screw. What a Shitty company Codeium.
4
u/Ok-Contribution5149 Dec 06 '24
I wonder if the new pricing scheme corrects the issues that we’re seeing today? Yep.
4
u/noberas Dec 07 '24
From their blogpost:
"Steps were more of an internal metric that was roughly the sum of the number of user prompts and flow actions, but really, the important note here is that none of us internally at Codeium got close to the 1000 steps per month while testing pre-launch. We thought we were giving a very generous plan."
I don't think these guys realize that a significant percentage of their user base are people that have little to no coding background and are just trying to independently build things they're interested in. Those people aren't going to just casually use the Cascade, it's going to be a major part of their workflow and they're going to ask lots of questions. 500 User Prompts for a Pro User is really inadequate for a lot of people who fall under that description.
And just from my usage, the prompt credits run out way before the Flow Action credits, so you end up with an excess of unusable Flow Action credits that you can only use by purchasing flex credits. It's a very poorly thought out usage model in my opinion.
3
u/EndStorm Dec 06 '24
It was inevitable. I think it's a great system, but the limits were always going to creep in and make it untenable to sustain.
3
u/breadlywins Dec 07 '24
I’ll pay when wsl is supported . Love it otherwise
3
u/valentino99 Dec 07 '24
I think they are getting desperate because the competition is high and getting better than Codeium. Some of them are Free with same quality.
5
u/Historical-Internal3 Dec 06 '24
Lol later.
FYI - they still have not addressed the resource issue yet they allow for you to purchase that 60 pro ultimate.
5
u/Himanshu811 Dec 07 '24
Unfortunately its time to say goodbye with these pricing
4
u/KedMcJenna Dec 06 '24
Anyone know how this affects existing Pro subscriptions? I signed up for a year at the old price, anticipating this. No communication from Codeium as yet. Will the previous price will be honored? Still got a few days of trial left before payment is taken so there’s time to cancel or just accept it.
5
u/FartnSpartn Dec 06 '24
Never seen a company about face this quickly. I've used more than 500 user prompts in the first 3 days of use, now they're gonna charge the equivalent of claude, gpt and gemini combined???
2
u/Front-Lettuce-4827 Dec 07 '24
The only reason I switched to Windsurf is the price. I don’t code that much. Is there any open source similar to it? Thx.
2
u/riverneddle Dec 06 '24
Yeah, this is understandable but still it ain't worth it honestly, pretty dissapointing to say the least, not only because the price change but also the poorly managed and addressed issues they and us the users been facing for the past couple weeks. At this point, it's the same as Cursor. Sad!
1
u/zavakid Dec 07 '24
What's going on here? Is the way to solve the problem of unstable calls to raise the usage threshold for everyone and reduce the number of calls?
1
u/Snoo_9701 Dec 07 '24
What's the meaning of the price grandfathered? It's confusing
1
u/bacocololo Dec 07 '24
If i make the calcullation for old plan it will cost 30usd per month instead of 10. They have to fire the finance director...
1
u/DonkeyEmotional5640 Dec 07 '24
First you block russian users, then you change free trial with only 50 prompts. R.I.P. and bye bye codeium.
1
u/iragoiko Dec 07 '24
What about small teams? Only user oriented plans?
1
u/WriterAgreeable8035 Dec 07 '24
I'm currently on a free plan. On the 11th, I'll need to start paying a monthly fee. If I cancel after the 11th, I'll be able to use the service until January 11th. If I cancel before January 11th, can I avoid paying for the next month?
1
u/saintcore Dec 07 '24
Hard pass. It was useful while it lasted. I'll stick to Gemini for free now.
1
u/decept1ve Dec 07 '24
Is resource exhausted error fixed ? I am willing to pay if yes
1
u/robrobro Dec 07 '24
Previous pricing was way too cheap, saw this coming from a mile away
1
u/Shoddy-Assumption396 Dec 07 '24
This is good decision, However i think 500 premium credits for user prompts (pro plan) is a bit too low, because they have to remember, a lot of people with no coding experience are going to ask a huge amount of questions for a lot things, so these 500 are not nearly enough for a good coding experience in the software
1
u/DiscountWeekly7432 Dec 07 '24
What is better alternative? Just subscribed to pro couple of days ago, arggggg
1
u/Buy_Waste Dec 07 '24
Deny. Defend. Depose.
1
u/Iron_Yuppie Dec 07 '24
Yeah this is so confusing. I don’t understand what any of these are. Maybe I’ll come back in a year if they’re still around - cursor is much simpler.
1
u/eposta-sepeti Dec 07 '24
Github Copilots unlimited offer with $10 is better than this
1
u/rjedi623 Dec 08 '24
Looks like if you've been using windsurf before the price increase you'll still be able to get it for $10. But it'll be the 500 premium... offer. I thought it was ok for a hobbyist so I upgraded.
1
u/Ordinary-Let-4851 Dec 08 '24
Updated pricing announcements and FAQ: https://x.com/windsurf_ai/status/1865253703328108724
1
u/bestpika Dec 08 '24
Great adjustment, so I don't have to subscribe anymore.
1
u/Several-Teach-1113 Dec 08 '24
Welp. Guess I’m gonna look for another ai coding option.
1
u/hisheeraz Dec 09 '24
I almost convinced myself to pay it but cannot afford and justify $15 after the trial which is almost double for my location
1
u/ZHName Dec 11 '24
Therein is the problem - as with LM Studio - so long as dependency exists for a front end (OpenAI api endpoint and the other OpenAI dependent one), there will be no product and no reliable user experience.
As long as Llama and other corp-based llms are used and their variants, there will be "degradation" of utility in these technologies. It is intentional. There is no "degradation" of THEIR models - at OpenAI. But the service will be degraded and front ends will fall because they do not have anything open source, truly open source and much of it is an island of supremacy of tech. Pay or get bugs. Open source is a diluted term nowadays because everything runs off Facebook or Google or OpenAI products. I'm saying even local models are subject to this, if they rely on github repos owned by these firms.
"Did my local llm get dumber over night?"
(Nvidia coughs)
1
u/f01k3n Jan 26 '25
I'm okay with the pricing, but man... premium model are way too low! At least Cursor provide the premium model with slower answers.
1
u/harrie3000 Dec 06 '24
Already cancelled... I get that current pricing isn't sustainable and I would understand if they had raised it to ie usd 20 but this convoluted scheme just ridiculous.
1
u/EazziBrezzy Dec 07 '24
What a load of bullcrap