JetBrains IDEs Go AI: Coding Agent, Smarter Assistance, Free Tier
128 comments
·April 16, 2025mike_hearn
netcan
>The business modelling behind it must be quite intense, I hope this doesn't blow up in JetBrains' face
Historically... this tends to work out. Reminds me of Gmail initially allowing massive inbox. YouTube doing free hosting. All the various untethered LAMP hosting...
If necessary they'll add an anti-abuse policy or whatnot to mitigate the heavy users.
The sophisticated modeling is basically "just get going" with a guesstimate and adjust if needed.
I doubt that pricing structure will sink any ships. It's going to be about utility.
mjrpes
> Historically... this tends to work out. Reminds me of Gmail initially allowing massive inbox. YouTube doing free hosting. All the various untethered LAMP hosting...
One difference I see: storage capacity and compute performance aren't increasing like they had in the past, so companies can't rely on these costs to dramatically drop in the future to offset bleeding cash initially to gain market share.
drakenot
The cost of inference[0] for the same quality has been dropping by nearly 10x year over year. I’m not sure when that trend will slow down, but there’s still been a lot of low-hanging fruit around algorithmic efficiency.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1gpr2p4/llms_co...
antisthenes
> One difference I see: storage capacity and compute performance aren't increasing like they had in the past
Companies stopped increasing free storage tiers ~10 years ago or even more, while the cost of storage has dropped significantly in that time period.
Both hard drives and SSDs.
netcan
Sure. I agree that usage/demand is likely to outgrow compute performance.
But.. a lot of the other dynamics that make this game winnable still stand. Maybe they will need to go with a meter eventually or some other pricing structure... but it will work out.
mrighele
The tokens are not unlimited though, Pro and Ultimate plan seems to differ essentially on the amount of tokens you get. [1]
Anyway I think that for the average developer (i.e. not enterprise customers) this is easier to reason about, so I am fine with that.
[1] https://www.jetbrains.com/ai-ides/buy/?section=personal&bill...
jsheard
It's odd that they don't seem to let you pay for overages, it looks like you are just shit out of luck past a certain point even on the most expensive plan.
mrighele
Also, "no credit system" for resharper and android studio. I am wondering if for the latter Google is footing the bill...
kowabungalow
I can't imagine it is healthy to consume anywhere near the limit.
lolinder
Were you able to figure out what constitutes a "credit"? I initially assumed they were following Cursor's (early) model of 1 prompt = 1 credit, with the tokens used to fulfill the prompt not costing anything. If that's how they're doing it that still leaves a bad taste when you waste a credit on something that doesn't work, but it does remove the need to care about how the tool gets there.
Ocha
It is by token - you get quota of tokens that once used up, disables your cloud integration
lolinder
Where are you reading this? I see there's a concept of "credits" but don't see any explanation of what a credit is.
jwortmann719
it is token based AFAIK, but we will provide some more information around credits/quota/tokens for the different price tiers in the coming days/weeks
shmatt
Junie has been amazing for me, completely replaced my payments for Claude Code and Cursor. And it was free (until today). It's the least aggressive agent i've used, no complete re-writes or even close, And is able to achieve about 95% of what I ask of it
The only downside - which might be fixed in the newest release - is that it completely forgets context between messages - even in the same message window. But that feels like both cost cutting and easy to fix
My biggest issues with Claude Code and Cursor for what its worth:
Claude Code: Price, plus when it doesnt get things right, within a few messages it ALWAYS just creates a new file entry point with some demo console.logs that do nothing but show messages, and claims to have succeeded in what I asked
Cursor: Will break some functionality in my web application while fixing or creating others, about 80% of the time
_bin_
Cursor results are going to depend heavily on the model; Gemini 2.5 pro exp seems the overall strongest. You’re probably defaulting to 3.7 sonnet which is completely unusable; it was good at first but I am convinced anthropic “updated” (degraded) it behind the scenes to lower their inference costs. OpenAI did the same with GPT-4o for a bit a while back before making it better again.
3.7 also seems to have converged more on the hybrid reddit user/npr listener/HR lady tone and manner of speaking that makes me want to punch a wall. Genuinely people could probably increase LLM usage just by fixing this problem and banning r*fit from the training set.
SparkyMcUnicorn
I've seen evidence that suggests this is false, and that it's more likely that cursor degraded the experience in their context window to save on costs.
The date stamped models haven't had any evidence of ever changing or degrading, to my knowledge. Aider did a test for this as well.
basejumping
Is there a way to use Claude within the Jetbrains IDEs? I have a Jetbrains IDE license, and a Claude subscription, but I couldn't find an integration. To use Claude and have it integrated I need to subscribe to Jebtbrains AI instead, but then I don't have Claude in the browser anymore.
rozhok
Ther is a bunch of wrapping plugins where you can provide your own API key, like proxyAI or Supermaven. Look in the plugins marketplace.
lantry
the Jetbrains AI assistant plugin lets you choose which model to use.
basejumping
Yes, but you need to pay the license to them. I guess I'll switch, it's just silly that there isn't an official integration
recursivedoubts
You can add a .noai file to the root of your project to disable AI support.
https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/disable-ai-assistant.htm...
Errr, that 404s now. I hope the functionality still works.
Here's the cached version:
https://web.archive.org/web/20250329143832/https://www.jetbr...
> Restrict usage of AI Assistant for a project Create an empty file named .noai in the root directory of the project.
> When this file is present, all AI Assistant features are fully disabled for the project. Even if this project is opened in another IDE, the AI Assistant features will not be available.
Aurornis
The AI feature is also opt-in, so you have to take steps to enable it.
The .noai file is helpful when you have specific projects that need to be excluded from AI tools.
recursivedoubts
I teach and absolutely must be able to disable AI for my student projects otherwise the students learn very little and are lead down false paths constantly
Aurornis
I guarantee your students are going to learn how to delete the .noai file
giancarlostoro
I used JetBrains AI for about a year, it was pretty good to basically help me to scaffold things, it felt like instructing a Junior developer, which isn't bad, saved me time for side projects.
Some observations from the pricingpage:
https://www.jetbrains.com/ai-ides/buy/?section=personal&bill...
* They say free for all IDEs except the community version of PyCharm and IntelliJ.
* Looks like if you want to use your own LLM you need to be an enterprise user? None of the lower tiers allow for it, I find this really, really dumb, if I'm paying for compute, why can't I also run my own LLM? Am I misunderstanding this?
* ReSharper and Android Studio don't fall under the credit system? I really would like to know what that means.
qskousen
From the blog post, it seems to say that the free tier of the AI assistant and Junie both allow using local models. I haven't tried it myself, though.
giancarlostoro
Ah thank you, I'll have to experiment with this when I get home. I mostly use this stuff for personal projects.
khaledh
Summary:
- JetBrains AI tools (AI Assistant and Junie coding agent) are now available under a single subscription starting with version 2025.1.
- There are three tiers: AI Free, AI Pro, and AI Ultimate.
- The free tier offers unlimited code completion, local AI models, and credit-based access to cloud AI assistance and Junie.
- AI Assistant supports Claude 3.7 Sonnet and Google Gemini 2.5 Pro.
- Junie is powered by Anthropic's Claude and OpenAI models.
It's not clear whether AI Free will be available in Community Edition IDEs or not.
Update: From the AI Plans & Pricing page, there's a tooltip that says: "The free tier is not available in the Community Editions of PyCharm and IntelliJ IDEA."
thenickdude
The free tier now supports connecting to local AI models running on LM Studio or Ollama, but it still doesn't actually function without an internet connection.
If you block access to the internet or to their AI API servers [1], it refuses to start a new chat invocation. If you block access halfway through a conversation, the conversation continues just fine, so there's no technical barrier to them actually running offline, they just don't allow it.
Their settings page also says that they can't even guarantee that they implemented the offline toggle properly, a flag that should be the easiest thing in the world to enforce:
>Prevents most remote calls, prioritizing local models. Despite these safeguards, rare instances of cloud usage may still occur.
So you can't even block access to the very servers that they say their faulty offline toggle would leak data to.
[1] https://www.jetbrains.com/help/ai-assistant/disable-ai-assis...
eclectric
I disconnect from the internet sometimes and noticed this morning that my previous night's chat was invisible. I could only see it once I connected again.
This puts me off a bit to finally try local models. Anyone know what kind data is collected in those rare instances of cloud usage?
t-redactyl
Hi, here are our data collection policies for the cloud-based LLMs. We've worked out agreements that heavily restrict how third party companies can use your data, including not storing it or using it for model training: https://www.jetbrains.com/help/ai/data-collection-and-use-po...
mgkimsal
"JetBrains Junie is now publicly available to all our IDE users."
Only for IntelliJ, WebStorm and PyCharm, so far.
I've been paying for the basic AI Assistant for months now, and am glad to see a bit more clarity around this.
esafak
I got confused by the Go in the title; "But their Go IDE is called GoLand?" They should not have capitalized it.
Anyway, has anyone compared Junie with competing products?
Medicineguy
I understand the confusion as I was confused myself for the same reason. I also attributed that to my english language level.
But I think they just used title-case[1]
esafak
Short, minor words are usually not capitalized, as stated in the wiki article; esp. if they would cause confusion!
nirvdrum
As far as I know, that rule doesn't apply to verbs. Do you have a style guide that indicates otherwise? I know it looks like I'm trying to correct someone's grammar online, but I'm legitimately trying to learn. Your comment made me curious so I searched for a bit but couldn't come up with anything.
denismi
> The AI Free tier gives you unlimited code completion and access to local AI models
Looking forward to giving this a try.
Work provides me with tooling and requires that I stick to approved AI tools, and my hobby-coding alone is just not important or regular enough to justify a paid subscription.
It's been a little annoying that I can have ollama running locally, enable ollama and configure it in my IDE, but still (seemingly?) not be able to make use of it without activating a paid AI Assistant license.
It makes perfect sense that cloud models would require payment, and that JetBrains would make some margin on that.
But I'm already paying for an IDE whose headline features have recently been so AI-focused, and if I'm also providing the compute, then I should really be able to use those features.
jwortmann719
You are getting the AI FRee tier with any paid license for a JetBrains IDE and as you stated it should work with local AI models. I looked through our internal documentation, and I couldn't find anything that stated anything different. If you run into issues, please open a YouTrack ticket and we can have a better discussion/look at what's going on, but with everything I see, I'd expect it to work the way you think.
l11r
AI assistant license is now included even in Free tier so you should be able to use Ollama without any problem after 2025.1 release.
pdpi
> On top of all that, the All Products Pack and dotUltimate subscriptions will now come with AI Pro included.
Well, colour me surprised. I've used JetBrains as an an example of a pretty decent company in the past (e.g. the way they remind you your subscription is up for renewal a couple of months in advance, so you have all the time in the world to unsub if you like), but I wasn't expecting them to just add this to the existing subscriptions.
blibble
you can read this as no-one was buying the addon
they'll eat the cost for a year or two, then bump up the subscription price to pay for it
pdpi
I honestly doubt that’s the plan.
They’ve bumped up the price once in all the years I’ve been subscribed to the All Tools pack. When they did that, they gave existing subscribers the option to buy two years’ subscription at the old price.
lolinder
Yeah, JetBrains has so far been incredibly good to their users, and it sure seems like they know that that has been their primary competitive advantage in a landscape dominated by free editors. Hopefully that calculation stays the same in the AI world.
singularity2001
I did;) unsubscribed every second month and resubscribed to see if it got better. now included, nice!
KronisLV
Oh hey, they've worked some more on the features: https://www.jetbrains.com/ai-assistant/
And it's available with the all products pack: https://www.jetbrains.com/ai-ides/buy/?section=personal&bill...
I think I'll be more than happy to try it out then cause I have that pack and compare it against the Github Copilot plugin, or the likes of Continue.dev (which was pretty good in VS Code, but kind of buggy in JetBrains IDEs).
pauleveritt
We've come a long way with AI Assistant in the last few months. Lots more planned.
KronisLV
That's awesome to hear, best of luck!
MarkOSullivan
How does JetBrains AI compare to Cursor?
williamzeng0
I think they're getting there but missing big features like a high quality "Apply" workflow and next-edit predictions.
I'm working with two of my friends to fill the missing pieces as a JetBrains plugin: https://docs.sweep.dev/
pauleveritt
That's cool that you're looking at those things. I hope we've made progress on "Apply" (and we're doing more.) And as heads-up, as you can imagine, we're looking at NEP.
It's pretty surprising that they're willing to charge a flat rate rather than by token, but great news for users. It's inevitable that you get annoyed at AI when it consumes tokens and generates a bad answer, or starts reading files that aren't fully relevant. The flat rate takes away that bad taste. The business modelling behind it must be quite intense, I hope this doesn't blow up in JetBrains' face if Junie's usage patterns change over time.
JetBrains are in a great position to do this though, perhaps the best position. Whereas a tool like Claude Code or Aider can give the LLM grep and little else [1], Junie can give the LLM a kind of textual API to the IDE's own static analysis database. If Claude/GPT want to understand what a function is doing and how it's used, it could issue a tool call that brings up nicely rendered API docs and nothing else, it could issue a tool call to navigate into it and read just the function body and so on. And they can use the IDE to check whether the code complies with the language rules more or less instantly without needing to do a full compile to pick up on hallucinated APIs or syntax errors.
So much potential with this kind of integration, all that stuff is barely the start.
[1] Aider attempts to build a "repo map" using a PageRank over symbols extracted by tree-sitter, but it never worked well for me.