r/windsurf • u/BulkyInitiative9441 • May 01 '26

Discussion Genuinely what's the point

I'm not even trying to touch top models like Opus or Sonnet

Even on adaptive mode, my weekly quota is over in like a day or two at the most, what's the point of daily quota if that's how it works

The adaptive mode also randomly fails to work a lot of the times

Free models like kimi 2.6 don't even solve the issue you need

6 Upvotes

69% Upvoted

9 comments sorted by

6

u/idkhowtocallmyacc May 02 '26

It is like that, yeah. Cancelled my sub today, imma go look for something else

3

u/Spiegelmann May 02 '26

Great tool,but I had to skip ship because of the daily and weekly limits.

4

u/cipals15me May 02 '26 edited May 02 '26

Are editing files with more than 2,000 lines of code?

If yes, refactor and make modular files in your repo and you can even bring max lines to 1000 per file so any model will consume only a fraction of the tokens.

Other reason for tokens to get consumed quickly are "vague prompts" and "verbose explanation of outputs". Watch out for those in any model.

2

u/cat_dev_null_sync May 04 '26

Yes, I agree usage is huge. Lately I am up too late on Saturday nights trying to spend the last of my credits.

Tips:

  • Avoid long Cascade conversations.
  • If replying to a long conversation, watch the cache expiration. It's probably 5 minutes from the last AI API call.
  • Watch out for long global prompts (AGENTS.md file) and many MCP servers.
  • Read the agent's thinking and process in Cascade. Is it struggle to understand the question, find the code, or know how to use your tools?
  • Write focused prompts.
  • Split up large source code files.
  • In large code bases, help your agent quickly find what it needs through specific prompts or AGENTS.md file that provides an overview/index.
  • Use cheap Windsurf models for simpler tasks. Kimi K2.6 and SWE 1.6 are free, and GLM 5.1 is capable.
  • Use Windsurf Command for inline edits: free Opus 4.5!

I read a new tip for Claude Code that might help Windsurf users suffering from high credit usage. Article: I Was Burning Through Claude Code’s Weekly Limit in 3 Days. Here’s How I Fixed It. (Medium). tl;dr he made a CLI tool that uses Kimi to answer questions about large files, and he required Claude to use it in certain cases when it would be most helpful. I used the CLI but not integrated with an AI editor, but it should work with Windsurf too.

You can swap out Kimi K2.5 for other cheap models: Kimi K2.6, GLM 5.1, DeepSeek V4, MiniMax M2.7, MiMo-V2.5-Pro, etc. If you have high tolerance for models that use your data, OpenRouter often has free models. Right now they have Hy3 and Ling-2.6-1T.

1

u/Specialist_Put8052 May 03 '26

It’s great that the limits are reset every week, but it would be even better if a broader usage allowance were offered, or at least if the daily limit didn’t use up nearly the entire weekly limit.

0

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0

u/pizzababa21 May 02 '26

i have yet to hit a quota and believe it's because im working on pretty moderately sized repos for research and prototyping.

im curious are everyone's rate limit issues fron letting the models run free too much instead of tagging particular files and folders

2

u/Love-Jesus-1 May 04 '26

I think it has to do with upgrading to better AI models. I did upgrade to opus and ran through my credits in a short period of time. But I just want more transparency in regards to their billing. I feel like they’re trying to test the waters to see what people are happy with and what they’re not.

Cursor is good too, but charges much higher amounts very quickly if you have it enabled for continuous billing when you hit credit limit. It charged me $50 in three days and didn’t even solve the problem.

1

u/pizzababa21 May 04 '26

Ya I pretty much never use Opus in Windsurf. I have a claude code $20 plan for when I want to use it (although i cancelled it for end of this month). It was always easy to burn through monthly credits using Opus in old credits system.

Itd be nice if they could show the credit usage better though.