Windsurf (formerly Codeium)

What it actually does

Windsurf is an AI coding tool: fast tab completions, chat, codebase context, and the Cascade agent, working across more than 40 IDEs and 70 or more languages. People who stayed with it like the editor. It loads quickly, the agent is capable, and the wiki and codemap features get specific praise.

The thing you need to know before any of that is who owns it. It launched as Codeium and renamed to Windsurf. In May 2025 Bloomberg reported OpenAI had agreed to buy it for $3 billion; that deal collapsed on 11 July 2025, partly because Microsoft's relationship with OpenAI would have given Microsoft access to Windsurf's intellectual property. Google then licensed the technology for $2.4 billion and hired the CEO, a co-founder and key engineers, a reverse acqui-hire that removed the leadership. Cognition AI, the company behind Devin, bought what was left for an undisclosed sum. Windsurf's pricing now lives on devin.ai. That is three custodians and one stripped-out founding team inside about a year, and the documentation has not kept pace.

What it costs

Pro is $20 a month. Teams starts at $80 a month plus $40 per seat. There is still a free plan with unlimited tab completions and a quota on agent usage.

The free plan is the thing that changed. Codeium's original offer, effectively unlimited, is what won the user base, and after the ownership changes it was cut back to a metered agent quota. If you last tried this as Codeium, the deal you remember is not the deal on offer. Check the current limits before you assume anything.

Credits are the recurring money complaint. Users report that credits burn far faster than expected, that 500 credits which used to last days now disappear, and that even at $60 a month it is not enough for normal work. Threads on r/windsurf describe quotas being quietly updated without warning.

Where it falls down

The loudest complaint is not the price. It is the silence. Users describe repeated reworks of the credit system with no communication from Cognition, which is a choice the company is making rather than a constraint it is under. Change the deal and say so, or do not be surprised when your Trustpilot page reads the way this one does.

The review split is the clearest evidence on the page. Windsurf holds 4.3 out of 5 on G2, with 93% of ratings at four or five stars, and 1.4 out of 5 on Trustpilot from 59 reviews. Note the G2 sample size: 35 reviews, listed under the old seller name Exafunction, and gathered largely before the pricing changes that produced the Trustpilot anger. A 4.3 from 35 old reviews and a 1.4 from 59 recent ones is not a contradiction. It is a timeline.

There is also a dependency risk that no amount of good engineering fixes. Anthropic limited Windsurf's direct access to Claude models with under five days' notice, so paying subscribers lost the model they had subscribed for. A tool that resells someone else's models can have its core feature withdrawn by a supplier, and Windsurf's corporate position makes it more exposed to that than most.

On capability, it is reasonably rated as less context-aware than Cursor.

Who should buy it

Use the free tier if you want unlimited tab completions and nothing else. It is still a fair way to get completions in an IDE at no cost, and if the quota runs out you have lost nothing.

Do not buy an annual plan. Do not build a team workflow on it. The pricing has been reworked repeatedly without notice, the leadership that built it works at Google now, and the current owner's communication record is the specific thing its users complain about. Whatever you sign up for today may not be what you have in six months, and that is a statement about the past two years rather than a prediction.

If you are paying $20 either way, Cursor is the stronger tool at the same price and Copilot is $10. Both have a clearer future. Windsurf earns 2.5 cyders because the editor is good and the custodian is not.