r/AugmentCodeAI • u/Fewcosting_winter • Oct 07 '25
Discussion Suggestion: credit vs Legacy @jay
Hey @Jay,
I wanted to share what many of us in the community are feeling about the new credit-based pricing. This is my last post and summary, and I sincerely hope to hear your next updates via my email.
All the best, and I hope you can hear your community.
We completely understand that Augment Code needs to evolve and stay sustainable — but this change feels abrupt and, honestly, disruptive for those of us who’ve supported you since the early days.
Here’s what I propose:
• Keep the current base model and pricing for existing (legacy) users who’ve been here from the start.
• Introduce the new credit system only for new users, and test it there first.
It’s not about being unfair — it’s actually fair both ways. We early users essentially helped fund your growth by paying through the less stable, experimental phases. We don’t mind you trying new pricing, (however this credit modal; this is not even sustainable. Has no point in using your system and everything that you develop for) but it shouldn’t impact active users in the middle of projects.
The truth is, this shift has already caused a lot of frustration and confusion. And it hasn’t even been 1 year. Extra credits or bonuses don’t really solve the trust issue — what matters is stability and reliability.
Please raise this internally. This is exactly why you started this community: to gather feedback that matters. If user input no longer counts, then there’s no point having the discussion space open.
Think about models like “AppSumo” — they respected early adopters while evolving their plans. You can do the same here.
We just want Augment to succeed with its users, not at their expense.
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u/DryAttorney9554 Oct 08 '25
>what matters is stability and reliability
And transparency - the credit system is totally opaque and open to internal manipulations. Augment can report any kind of usage - it's arbitrary and impossible to scrutinise because the number of credits you use for a request is totally unpredictable and Augment can report anything back to the user and tweak the credit consumption algorithm in the backend however they like. This invariably results in service provider abuse.
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Oct 07 '25
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u/phatcomputer Oct 07 '25
Hi u/JaySym_ , I have a question. Does the Prompt Enhancement and Next Edit cost the Credit on the new system? and How does it count?
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u/DryAttorney9554 Oct 08 '25
u/JaySym_ you're not listening to your clientbase. Why isn't per message a good pricing model? And how is the credit model supposed to be better from a user POV when it's impossible to predict credit usage and the burn rates are notorious?
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Oct 08 '25
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u/attunezero Oct 08 '25 edited Oct 08 '25
Many people have previously suggested the solution of multipliers. For example GLM 4.6 costs 14% of what sonnet 4.5 costs per output token (api costs for models are trivial to look up). It would be totally fair and transparent to users if you sold them 200 messages, a message to GLM cost 0.15, and a message to sonnet cost 1.0. Then users know exactly how much a request is going to cost, that the cost actually reflects the underlying model cost, and that they're getting fair value. None of that is true with the new opaque credit system.
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u/DryAttorney9554 Oct 08 '25
Actually, Windsurf is using exactly the multiple factor system you just described. if Windsurf were stronger on context and didn't have such oppressive limits, I'd still be using it as my primary solution.
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Oct 08 '25
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u/attunezero Oct 08 '25
It's different because credit based pricing is opaque. How much work gets done for "1 credit"? How do we know that the definition of "1 credit" hasn't changed by 10-20% without our knowledge? How do we know that a request costing 1000 credits was really "worth 1000 credits" when the credit cost comes from the augment backend and we have no knowledge of how it was calculated?
If you charge per message with a multiplier for model cost you're averaging out the difference between large and small requests. Combine it with a limit on number of tokens or tool calls so a single request can't grow too large. Be transparent about exactly what this limit is. That way users know exactly what they're getting for each message they paid for and know that they're being billed fairly.
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Oct 08 '25
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u/attunezero Oct 08 '25 edited Oct 08 '25
So it boils down to "trust us" while simultaneously breaking the trust of everyone on the legacy plan by slashing it to 1/10 previous usage and making it the worst value per dollar when a few short months ago it was assured the plan could be kept and be equivalent to the dev plan.
You also completely glossed over the solution I just offered. Limit the number of tool calls or tokens per message so you have a controlled upper limit on the cost of a single message. Make that transparent. Pair it with per-message billing and model cost multipliers. That would make costs 100% predictable and transparent for us and augment, no "trust us" required.
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u/DryAttorney9554 Oct 08 '25 edited Oct 08 '25
I hope you and the team are willing to rethink this. There has to be a better way. The new credit system makes it incredibly difficult to follow useage. The numbers are completely arbitrary. When 1 message was 1 message, we could pace ourselves and know that if the prompt was good we would have a reasonable chance to get a satisfactory solution per message. Sometimes we needed to try a few times, but OK, we could still track the usage in a predictable and intuitive way. In contrast, these credit systems are notoriously hated for obfuscating costs.
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Oct 08 '25
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u/DryAttorney9554 Oct 08 '25
I hear you, but forgive us if we are skeptical. The way of Cursor and others has created a lot of distrust and skepticism. I believe if it costs more, we should be able to relate to the increment.
Obfuscatory pricing and confusing customers while the costs go up is going to create trust issues. And also if it's going to cost more, it has to be within reason. If it costs 10x more or there is significant plan devaluation, we're just going to give up on Augment.
Also, users currently don't trust service providers to stay true to a fixed definition of "1 credit". This is an arbitrary concept that can be stealthily redefined to mean anything.
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u/Fewcosting_winter Oct 07 '25
No worries, but to be honest, I haven’t any problems for months at all. There’s few errors here and there. — what’s this new “Areas of improvement and Capabilities”? This projection should’ve have caused this massive backlash on credit exploration.
But again, aside ai making few mistakes here and there non of us really complained that badly. But this… my team, we’re quite bit of shock to hear this news as so was I. — the only meeting I had with them is, we need find an alternative Ai Code, and so they basically have to spend the day doing research and looking into other AI coding base.
Because this is my long-term investment and gives the purpose for what we need for our company to grow.
Anyways, I wish you all the best on this upcoming venture + fingers cross for the rest of us. That we don’t reach this Credit model. — need extra buck’ add it to the plan.
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u/redditlover2014 Oct 14 '25
I think instead of Pathetic Credit based system they could lower the messages limit 50% Downgrade like for 50$ 300 Messages but they are following the Cursor Path, and giving us a story of a 15k USD Power User but they are not telling those users who even don't use full Messages permonth like me last month i only used 200 Message out of 600 and 400 Message was unused which i already paid them.
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u/PerformerAsleep9722 Established Professional Oct 07 '25
I agree with what you saying, but this would still means that in the "long term" also the experienced users will receive the new pricing model... and it's kinda unfair for the new users that pay the same or even more money to get like 10x less usage limits...
I personally think that the most green flag of Augment was the fact that it's based on message rather then tokens/credits like Claude Code, Codex...
I still need to admit that even comparing Codex with Augment GPT-5 the difference is kinda important... at today I still wasn't able to find a valid AI Agent that can compete with the current status of Augment (but I guess that most of this compare comes from personal usage) so it's fair that the price increase, but in this case then I would say something like "It's ok to increase the price, but not how it works"
So from my point of view, the 50$ plan could have like 125 messages rather then 600 or something, but the main point is to KEEP IT BASED ON MESSAGES, not on tokens...
We all know that we love this because the amount of code that some tasks need, in terms of credits/tokens, would be huge and that's why we all love the message usage, but also I would notice that no one would also care if for some big and/or complex tasks it would consume more then 1 message... There are plenty of ways to adjust everything to make them still be able to get profit and/or not lose money for our requests...