Which cheap AI coding assistant is good enough for daily work?

The cheapest sensible starting point is a free completion tool, with GitHub Copilot Pro at $10 a month as a paid baseline for daily editor work. For terminal agents, a free client plus a low-cost API can cost less, although repeated context and retries make the bill variable. Prices below are in US dollars unless stated otherwise, as of October 22, 2026.

Start with the bill you can control

Copilot Pro costs $10 a month and keeps code completions and next-edit suggestions outside its metered AI-credit allowance. That makes it my default paid recommendation for someone who writes most code themselves and wants assistance throughout the day. It is less predictable for someone delegating long tasks to agents, because those features consume credits.

Completion, conversational help and autonomous edits have different charging rules. A monthly seat can include unlimited completion while imposing a small agent budget.

The table compares individual entry points, with monthly prices before tax unless marked otherwise. Recommendations concern budget and workflow.

Product	Price	Best for	Limits
GitHub Copilot Free	$0	Occasional completion	2,000 completions monthly; limited chat
GitHub Copilot Pro	$10	Daily completion	$15 monthly AI-credit allowance
Cursor Free	$0	Trying Cursor	Limited agent and chat requests
Cursor through X Plus	$8	Grok-based coding	Shared weekly usage; Grok models only
Devin Desktop Free	$0	Completion with occasional agents	Light agent quota
Devin Desktop Pro	$20	More agent work	Daily and weekly quotas
Google Antigravity individual	$0	Free Google coding tools	Basic weekly agent limits
Amazon Q Developer Free	$0	Occasional IDE assistance	50 agentic requests monthly
JetBrains AI Free	$0	Existing JetBrains users	3 AI credits per 30 days
JetBrains AI Pro	$10	Paid JetBrains assistance	10 AI credits per 30 days
Claude Pro	$20	Claude Code plus chat	Shared session and weekly limits
ChatGPT Plus	$20	Codex plus ChatGPT	Model-dependent five-hour limits
Tabnine Code Assistant	$39 historically	Enterprise procurement	Annual subscription; model charges extra
Aider, OpenCode or Cline	Usage-based	Controlling API spending	Provider token rates and limits
Ollama local models	$0 API charge	Existing suitable hardware	Memory and processing capacity

Copilot is the straightforward paid baseline

GitHub's current Pro offer includes 1,500 AI credits, equivalent to $15 of metered usage, for the $10 subscription. That consists of $10 in base credits and a $5 flex allotment. GitHub says the flex portion can change, so budget around the base rather than treating the bonus as permanent.

Completions and next-edit suggestions remain unlimited on paid plans and do not consume these credits. Chat, CLI work and cloud agents do consume them. Included credits expire each month, with the allowance resetting on the first day of the calendar month at 00:00 UTC.

Older comparisons showing 300 premium requests for Pro describe the earlier billing system. GitHub introduced usage-based AI-credit billing on June 1, 2026. A fixed number of prompts therefore cannot describe a new subscriber's current agent allowance.

Free still includes 2,000 completions monthly, with limited chat and agent usage. Over an assumed 22 working days, that is about 91 completions daily. Treat it as a useful trial or light-work allowance. Pro removes the completion ceiling, while additional agent spending needs its own budget.

Cursor and Windsurf have changed their offers

Cursor's current new-customer entry plan is $8 monthly through The X Subscription's Plus tier. The October 12, 2026 announcement bundles Cursor with Grok and X. Existing Cursor subscriptions can continue, so a current subscriber's account may still show the older Hobby or Pro packaging.

Plus includes Grok models only. Premium costs $30 monthly and permits third-party models in Cursor, billed separately at API list prices. Its included usage is four times Plus, while all included Grok usage shares a weekly pool across Grok and Cursor. Using the same subscription for noncoding work can reduce the allowance left for coding.

This makes the $8 price attractive only if you intend to use Grok. It is a poor basis for estimating a month of Claude usage inside Cursor, because third-party usage is outside that included pool.

Windsurf became Devin Desktop on June 2, 2026. Its free plan includes unlimited Tab completions and inline edits, plus a light agent quota. Pro costs $20 monthly. The newer quota system measures model usage against daily and weekly budgets, rather than promising a fixed number of prompts. Paid users can purchase extra usage at API prices; free users must wait for their allowance to reset.

Google's old free quotas are historical now

Google ended consumer access through Gemini Code Assist IDE extensions and Gemini CLI on June 18, 2026. That includes the individual free tier and access through Google AI Pro and Ultra. Google directs those users to Antigravity and Antigravity CLI.

The widely repeated 180,000 monthly completions and 1,000 daily model requests belong to the earlier consumer offer. They should not be treated as an October entitlement. The old CLI and IDE agent quotas also shared usage, and one prompt could trigger several model requests.

Antigravity's individual plan is $0 monthly, with unlimited Tab completions and Command requests, plus basic weekly agent rate limits. The pricing page does not express that agent allowance as a fixed daily request count. Choose it for free completion and evaluate how its weekly allowance fits your own workload.

Amazon Q Developer Free has a more explicit ceiling: 50 agentic requests monthly across its IDE and CLI interfaces. That averages about 2.3 requests per working day under a 22-day assumption. Its separate Java transformation allowance covers 1,000 submitted lines monthly. Q Free fits occasional questions better than continuous agent delegation; Pro costs $19 per user monthly.

Existing subscriptions can be the cheapest upgrade

JetBrains AI Free includes 3 AI credits per 30 days. The personal AI Pro tier lists $10 and 10 credits per 30 days, with each credit corresponding to $1 of service usage. AI Assistant and Junie draw on the same pool, so using both does not double the allowance.

JetBrains separates cloud quota from unlimited code completion and local-model use. AI Pro is also included with qualifying All Products Pack and dotUltimate subscriptions. Check your existing license before adding another subscription. Purchased top-up credits last 12 months, unlike the recurring allowance.

Claude Pro costs $20 monthly and includes Claude Code. Annual billing costs $200 upfront. Claude chat and Claude Code share usage limits, with session limits resetting every five hours and additional weekly limits. Anthropic does not guarantee a universal number of coding prompts: context, model choice and task length affect consumption. An API key can instead trigger separate API billing.

ChatGPT Plus also costs $20 monthly and includes Codex. OpenAI's published local-message ranges are 33 to 168 per five hours for GPT-5.4, or 110 to 560 for GPT-5.4-mini. Additional weekly limits may apply. These are variable ranges, and the cloud-task allowance depends on the selected model. Existing Plus subscribers should try included Codex before purchasing another coding subscription.

Free clients make API prices easier to compare

Aider, OpenCode and Cline support connecting model providers rather than requiring a bundled model subscription. Their free software does not make hosted inference free. With your own API key, the provider's token prices and rate limits determine the bill. Cline also supports local runtimes including Ollama.

For a concrete daily planning example, assume one million uncached prompt tokens and 100,000 generated tokens, spread across coding tasks. This is an illustrative budget, not a measured average developer workload. Repeated repository context counts again when it misses the cache; agent retries and tool results can increase consumption.

API model	Uncached prompt tokens per million	Output per million tokens	Illustrative daily cost
deepseek-flash, off-peak	$0.15	$0.60	$0.21
deepseek-flash, peak	$0.30	$1.20	$0.42
qwen3-coder-flash, Singapore	$0.30	$1.50	$0.45
kimi-k2.7-code	$0.95	$4.00	$1.35

The Qwen example assumes every request stays within the 32,000-token pricing tier. Larger requests and other regions have different prices. DeepSeek's cached rates are lower, but a budget should not assume every request receives a cache hit.

Across 22 working days, these examples cost $4.62, $9.24, $9.90 and $29.70 respectively. By comparison, $10 and $20 subscriptions cost about $0.45 and $0.91 per working day before overages. DeepSeek is a reasonable low-cost experiment; a subscription can be cheaper once a busy agent's token consumption grows.

Local inference and enterprise contracts need separate budgets

Ollama running a model on your own hardware avoids a provider's per-token charge. Hardware and electricity still cost money. Model size, context length and concurrent requests determine memory requirements, so choose a model that fits the machine before treating local inference as a daily replacement.

Ollama says it does not see prompts processed locally. Cloud-hosted Ollama models are a different service. For local-only operation, its documented cloud-disable setting prevents cloud features from being used. Prefer this route when keeping code on the machine matters enough to accept hardware constraints.

Tabnine belongs in an enterprise purchasing discussion. Tricentis announced its acquisition on July 30, 2026. Tabnine's earlier published annual-subscription prices were $39 per user monthly for Code Assistant and $59 for Agentic Platform, with Tabnine-managed model usage charged at provider prices plus 5%. Treat those as historical reference prices for a contract conversation, rather than a current self-service budget option.

Choose by your working pattern

• Mostly writing code yourself: start with free completions. Choose Copilot Pro at $10 if its unlimited paid completion and editor assistance fit your work.
• Wanting a free Google tool: choose Antigravity's current individual offer. Plan around weekly agent limits instead of the retired Gemini consumer quotas.
• Already paying for an IDE or chatbot: check bundled JetBrains AI, Claude Code or Codex access first. Avoid buying overlapping allowances before using the one you have.
• Comfortable managing API spending: try Aider, OpenCode or Cline with a small prepaid balance. Use the token example as a starting budget and inspect consumption after agent tasks.
• Keeping code local: use Ollama with a model your hardware can run. Keep cloud features disabled when local-only processing is a requirement.