[HN Gopher] An update to our pricing
___________________________________________________________________
An update to our pricing
Author : mefengl
Score : 85 points
Date : 2025-04-21 19:05 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (windsurf.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (windsurf.com)
| jawns wrote:
| 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.
| jelling wrote:
| Clarifying the pricing would make it easier to value the
| revenue from current and future users. And naturally they
| rounded up to leave themselves literal margin for error.
| Jcampuzano2 wrote:
| Curious - what makes you pick, windsurf over other editors. I
| currently use Cursor but have seen more news about windsurf,
| especially after the recent news with respect to OpenAI. Do you
| find it better, worse, etc. And are there things it does better
| for you than other editors.
| leobuskin wrote:
| I don't like the "vibe" term nowadays, but when you mix two
| pretty abstract domains (AI and development), it's all about
| vibes and aura. Some model/agent works perfectly for one of
| us (let's keep in mind, we have a bunch of factors, from
| language to the complexity of the implementation), and does
| everything wrong for others.
|
| You just can't measure it properly, outside of experiments
| and building your own assessment within your context. All the
| recommendations here just don't work. "Try all of them, stick
| with one for a while, don't forget to retry others on a
| regular basis" - that's my moto today.
|
| Cursor (as an agent/orchestrator) didn't work for me at all
| (Python, low-level, no frameworks, not webdev). I fell in
| love with Windsurf ($60 tier initially). Switched entirely to
| JetBrains AI a few days ago (vscode is not friendly for me,
| PyCharm rocks), so happy about the price drop.
| croes wrote:
| Related?
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43708725
| dang wrote:
| Thanks! Macroexpanded:
|
| _Why is OpenAI buying Windsurf?_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43743993 - April 2025 (218
| comments)
|
| _OpenAI looked at buying Cursor creator before turning to
| Windsurf_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43716856 -
| April 2025 (115 comments)
|
| _OpenAI in Talks to Buy Windsurf for About $3B_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43708725 - April 2025 (44
| comments)
| rudedogg wrote:
| > 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?
| simonw wrote:
| Yeah that's a bad look. If I have an API key visible in my code
| does that get packaged up as a "prompt" automatically? Could it
| be spat out to some other user of a model in the future?
|
| (I assume that there's a reason that wouldn't happen, but it
| would be nice to know what that reason is.)
| isjustintime wrote:
| I'm also interested in the details on how this works in
| practice. I know that there was a front page post a few weeks
| ago about how Cursor worked, and there was a short blurb
| about how sets of security prompts told the LLM to not do
| things like hard code API keys, but nothing on the training
| side.
| blibble wrote:
| it's the reason they bought it...
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| Gemini doesn't use paid API prompts for training.[1]
|
| I believe its just for free usage and the web app.
|
| [1]https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/pricing
| Alifatisk wrote:
| That's what I thought
| rudedogg wrote:
| Yeah, I was referring to their webapp/Chat, aka Gemini
| Advanced. It uses your prompts for training unless you turn
| off chat history completely, or are in their "Workspace"
| enterprise version.
|
| https://support.google.com/gemini/answer/13594961?hl=en
|
| > What data is collected and how it's used
|
| > Google collects your chats (including recordings of your
| Gemini Live interactions), what you share with Gemini Apps
| (like files, images, and screens), related product usage
| information, your feedback, and info about your location.
| Info about your location includes the general area from your
| device, IP address, or Home or Work addresses in your Google
| Account. Learn more about location data at
| g.co/privacypolicy/location.
|
| Google uses this data, consistent with our Privacy Policy, to
| provide, improve, and develop Google products and services
| and machine-learning technologies, including Google's
| enterprise products such as Google Cloud.
|
| Gemini Apps Activity is on by default if you are 18 or older.
| Users under 18 can choose to turn it on. If your Gemini Apps
| Activity setting is on, Google stores your Gemini Apps
| activity with your Google Account for up to 18 months. You
| can change this to 3 or 36 months in your Gemini Apps
| Activity setting.
| Alifatisk wrote:
| No way Gemini Advanced user content is also being used for
| training?
| amelius wrote:
| Windsurf: where the users provide the wind and they do all the
| surfing.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| Without exception, every AI company is a play for your data. AI
| _requires_ a continuing supply of new data to train on, it does
| not "get better" merely by using the existing trainsets with
| more compute.
|
| Furthermore, synthetic data is a flawed concept. At a minimum,
| it tends to propagate and amplify biases in the model
| generating the data. If you ignore that, there's also the
| fundamental issue that data doesn't exist purely to run more
| gradient descent, but to provide new information that isn't
| already compressed into the existing model. Providing
| additional copies of the same information cannot help.
| kadushka wrote:
| _it does not "get better" merely by using the existing
| trainsets with more compute._
|
| Pretty sure it does - that's the whole point of using more
| test time compute. Also, a lot of research efforts goes into
| improving data efficiency.
| parliament32 wrote:
| > Same with Gemini Advanced (paid) training on your prompts
|
| I'm not sure if this is true.
|
| > 17. Training Restriction. Google will not use Customer Data
| to train or fine-tune any AI/ML models without Customer's prior
| permission or instruction.
|
| https://cloud.google.com/terms/service-terms
|
| > This Generative AI for Google Workspace Privacy Hub covers...
| the Gemini app on web (i.e. gemini.google.com) and mobile
| (Android and iOS).
|
| > Your content is not used for any other customers. Your
| content is not human reviewed or used for Generative AI model
| training outside your domain without permission.
|
| > The prompts that a user enters when interacting with features
| available in Gemini are not used beyond the context of the user
| trust boundary. Prompt content is not used for training
| generative AI models outside of your domain without your
| permission.
|
| > Does Google use my data (including prompts) to train
| generative AI models? No. User prompts are considered customer
| data under the Cloud Data Processing Addendum.
|
| https://support.google.com/a/answer/15706919
| simonw wrote:
| Right, it's the free Gemini that has this:
| https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/terms#unpaid-services
|
| > When you use Unpaid Services, including, for example,
| Google AI Studio and the unpaid quota on Gemini API, Google
| uses the content you submit to the Services and any generated
| responses to provide, improve, and develop Google products
| and services and machine learning technologies, including
| Google's enterprise features, products, and services,
| consistent with our Privacy Policy.
| rudedogg wrote:
| That's for Google Cloud APIs.
|
| See my post here about Gemini Advanced (the web chat app)
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43756269
| graeme wrote:
| Oh, that's not great. Cursor has a privacy mode where you can
| avoid this.
|
| >If you enable "Privacy Mode" in Cursor's settings: zero data
| retention will be enabled, and none of your code will ever be
| stored or trained on by us or any third-party.
|
| https://www.cursor.com/privacy
| 627467 wrote:
| Hey we all want to keep and eat the cake, but I'm (kinda?)
| surprised that people expect these services that have been
| trained on large swaths of "available" data and now don't want
| to contribute. Even if you're paying: why the selfishness?
| sdesol wrote:
| I think it is more of, LLMs should be treated as a utility
| service. Unless Google and others can clearly show the
| training data involved, the price that providers can charge
| for LLMs should be capped. I have no issue with contributing
| my conversations and my open source code, and I should expect
| in return a fair price.
| dockercompost wrote:
| This is a welcome change. It feels bad when your 250 line doc
| eats up 3 credits just being read and analyzed.
| Animats wrote:
| Could someone boil this down to "xx% price increase", please.
| tomschwiha wrote:
| As far as I understand it's No increase but an update.
| elashri wrote:
| 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.
| rohanphadte wrote:
| The previous two token limits were: user prompt credits (500)
| flow actions credits (1500)
|
| For power users, flow actions would deplete much more quickly
| (every time the LLM analyzed a file, edited, etc), so Windsurf
| removed the flow action limit, so you're only getting charged
| for 500 messages to the AI, which is strictly better for the
| user.
| SquareWheel wrote:
| 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?
| mediaman wrote:
| I find Cursor annoying too, with dumb suggestions getting in
| the way of my attempts to tab-indent. They should make shift-
| tab the default way to accept its suggestion, instead of tab,
| or at least let shift-tab indent without accepting anything if
| they really want to keep tab as default autocomplete.
| jawns wrote:
| I find it's very model-dependent. You would think that the more
| powerful models would work the best, but that hasn't been the
| case for me. Claude Sonnet tends to do the best job of
| understanding my intent and not screwing things up.
|
| I've also found that test-driven development is even more
| critical for these tools than for human devs. Fortunately, it's
| also far less of a chore.
| braza wrote:
| 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?
| ariejan wrote:
| With Windsurf I'm able to pick any of the premium language
| models. I.e. Claude 3.7 Sonnet costs 1 credit / prompt, whereas
| the thinking model costs 1.25 credits, and o3 costs a whopping
| 7.5 credits.
|
| It's simply passing on the cost of respective model's costs, I
| think. I can image it's hard to come up with an affordable /
| interesting flat rate _and_ support all those differently
| priced models.
| Jcampuzano2 wrote:
| 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?
| sunaookami wrote:
| 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?
| Abde-Notte wrote:
| i've used both a bit. cursor has more features and feels more
| polished, but windsurf is faster and cheaper. windsurf also has
| a cleaner UI. if you don't need all the extra stuff in cursor,
| windsurf's a pretty solid option.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| Solely from reading the headline, I'm going to assume "update"
| means "price increase". I'm going to read the rest of the article
| before continuing the comment.
|
| Alright, I'm back, this sounds like one of the rare times in
| which a pricing "update" is actually an update and not just a
| disguised increase. But I'm also not a Windsurf user, so let me
| jump through some of the comments and double-check that I didn't
| get hoodwinked.
|
| ...and the comments seem pretty positive, at least regarding the
| pricing. So I think this is _actually_ one of those few times
| "update" means "update".
| amiantos wrote:
| 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.
| bogtog wrote:
| > I spent about an hour using Cursor Pro and had used up over
| 30% of my monthly credits
|
| Sorry, but how is this possible? They give 500 credits in a
| month for the "premium" queries. I don't even think I'd be able
| to ask more than one question per minute even with tiny
| requests. I haven't tried the Agent mode. Does that burn
| through queries?
| amiantos wrote:
| I had to do a little digging to respond to this properly.
|
| I was on the "Pro Trial" where you get 150 premium requests
| and I had very quickly used 34 for them, which admittedly is
| 22% and not 30%. Their pricing page says that the Free plan
| includes "Pro two-week trial", but they do not explain that
| on the pro trial you only get 150 premium requests and that
| on the real Pro plan you get 500 premium requests. So you're
| correct to be skeptical, I did not use 30% of 500 requests on
| the Pro plan. I used 22% of the 150 requests you get on the
| Trial Pro plan.
|
| And yes, I think the agent mode can burn through credits
| pretty quickly.
| adamgordonbell wrote:
| With an agent, one request could be 20 or more iterations
| asdsadasdasd123 wrote:
| How do you run out of premium requests, I've peeked at the
| stats across my company and never seen this happen.
| janpaul123 wrote:
| Yeah, my colleague just wrote about this exact problem of
| incentive misalignment with Cursor and Windsurf
| https://blog.kilocode.ai/p/why-cursors-flat-fee-pricing-will
|
| The economist in me is says "just show the prices", though the
| psychologist in me says "that's hella stressful". ;)
| ricksunny wrote:
| Why does the psychologist in you say "that's hella
| stressful", e.g. Stressful for who? What is the source of
| their stress?
| janpaul123 wrote:
| 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.
| newlisp wrote:
| I haven't used either but reading Cursor's website, they let
| you add your own Claude API key, do they still fiddle with your
| requests using your own key?
| amiantos wrote:
| When you go to add your own API key into Cursor, you get a
| warning message that several Cursor features cannot be used
| if you plug in your own API key. I would totally have done
| that if not for that message.
| lherron wrote:
| I chalk it up to VC subsidized pricing. I use my monthly Cursor
| quota, then switch to Claude Code when I run out.
| adamgordonbell wrote:
| 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?
| moshegramovsky wrote:
| 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 obscure compiler error
| that I'd never encountered in my several decades long career as
| a developer. Gemini didn't even get close.
|
| Most of the other services seem focused on using the AWS pay-
| as-you-go pricing model. It's okay to use that pricing model
| but it's not easy for me to pitch it at work when I can't say
| exactly what the monthly cost is going to be. I love being a
| developer, but I feel like I'd like it a lot less without
| Gemini. I'm much more productive and less stressed too.
| cirrus3 wrote:
| 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?
| ramesh31 wrote:
| >Anything the requires me to use a different IDE is a non-
| starter for me.
|
| Windsurf is, ultimately, just an IDE extension. They shipped a
| forked VSCode with their branding for... some reason. But the
| extension is available in practically every IDE/editor.
| newlisp wrote:
| The reason for forking is the restrictions of the vscode API,
| so no, the extensions and the fork are not the same.
| ramesh31 wrote:
| The extension seems to provide the exact same
| functionality, so I'm not sure what's really needed there.
| In fact, I have had better results with the Jetbrains and
| Sublime extensions than the Windsurf editor.
| ramesh31 wrote:
| As a daily full time Windsurf user, I can emphatically state that
| it is strictly inferior to multiple free/open source tools like
| Cline and Claude Code that work directly with Anthropic/OpenAI
| keys, no "flow credits" involved.
|
| Good on them for catching the enterprise market, but that's about
| all it is; an enterprise friendly wrapper for a second-rate
| VSCode extension.
| victorbjorklund wrote:
| Claude code is neither free nor open source.
| ramesh31 wrote:
| >Claude code is neither free nor open source.
|
| "Free" as in no "middleman accounts" or other nonsense. You
| pay the base token rate directly to Anthropic, and that's it.
| Ylpertnodi wrote:
| >"Free" as in [.....y]ou pay [...]
|
| Possibly the worst comment I've ever read on this site.
| And, by 'possibly', I mean 'most definitely'.
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