An update to our pricing

> 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 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?

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.

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?

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.

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?

Related?

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

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.

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?

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?

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

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?