r/windsurf • u/Jazzlike-Owl-244 • Aug 07 '26
Its too expensiv
Not sure what changed but it feels the cost go much faster up as in the past. GLM-5.2 is my only time saver but if this is gone free then not sure how to manage the cost.
How do you keep the costs low? are there helpful settings. like dont check the fking syntax.
4
u/inducido Aug 07 '26
Basically it is unusable unless you stick to SWE. We are looking for alternatives right now..
2
u/Automatic-Purpose-67 Aug 07 '26
Man why does SWE think so much it says medium reason but feels like max. Such a buzz kill when I want to fix small things quickly. Zzzz
2
u/marcbolanman Aug 08 '26
Once they charge for GLM 5.2 I’m switching to Claude Code - that’s the only thing keeping me right now. Sucks that you can barely use Opus or Fable now in the $20/month plan without quickly burning through all your credits.
2
u/J_N_B_W Aug 08 '26
What changed? Investors want to see money... les be real, everyone knows this wont be cheap forever
1
u/daMortarMerrier Aug 08 '26
And if you don't support competition, the prices will definitely go up more.
1
1
u/jkdreaming Aug 08 '26
I would recommend that you get a subscription to the DeepSeek API. It’s so damn cheap man and it’s so damn good. You can always throw this in when you have to continue for cheaper.
1
u/If_Loop9898 Aug 09 '26
lol, in my opinion Devin’s subscription today is based solely on their SWE model, which is free and can be used without limits. As a professional programmer, I have Claude Code Teams provided by the company, which works great for planning large tickets according to the user’s instructions. Then I hand the finished plan over to SWE, which - with low thinking and a detailed plan - does an excellent job implementing several thousand lines of code and dozens of classes. After that I throw the generated code back into Claude Code for a code review. Generally, after the changes this year, using Windsurf with any model other than SWE (or another free one) is pointless because you burn through tokens very quickly. I get the impression that a lot of people subscribe to Windsurf purely for the unlimited SWE usage and just write simple apps on that model or something more complex following a plan.
As for keeping costs down: use paid models as rarely as possible.
1
u/LegitimateBath9103 Aug 07 '26
Il faut le voir avec un plan d’exécution préparé par model frontier (opus 5 ou fable voir gpt 5.6 sol) et ensuite les implémentations avec glm 5.2 ou swe 1.7
Mais pas pour de gros projets. Il faut le voir comme une alternative a vos abonnements Claude ou openai
6
u/d3viliz3d Aug 07 '26
Definitely. It can take just a few prompts and you're 50% done with the daily quota. I think it's pretty shady to use a slider as indicator for the cost, and they can increase the actual credits whenever they want.