Refact.ai Review, Pricing & Alternatives (2026)

Refact.ai is an open-source coding assistant from SmallCloud AI, founded by Oleg Klimov, Vlad Guber, and Oleg Kiyashko. The team began work in 2021, and the IDE plugin launched on March 31, 2023 with completion, refactoring, and chat. TechCrunch reported in January 2024 that Refact had raised $2 million, run about 20 pilots, and operated with an eight-person London team. Its Agent became available to all users on January 31, 2025, adding autonomous planning, execution, and testing. A May 2025 company test recorded 59.7 percent on SWE-bench Lite for Refact Agent using Claude 3.7 Sonnet across 179 tasks. Refact Cloud shut down on April 30, 2026, removing managed accounts, hosted credits, and paid cloud subscriptions. The continuing project is local-first, with provider keys, local runtimes, and custom OpenAI-compatible endpoints.

Refact combines inline completion, repository-aware chat, retrieval augmented generation, and autonomous coding tasks in one IDE workflow. Its Agent can plan work, edit files, execute commands, run tests, and handle multi-file changes, including rollback and direct patching. The continuing project supports shell and browser access, GitHub and GitLab, database and Docker workflows, MCP, and a command-line interface, according to the 2026 shutdown announcement. A typical session starts by installing the IDE plugin, indexing a repository, selecting a provider or local runtime, and requesting an explanation, patch, test, or implementation. After Refact Cloud shut down on April 30, 2026, supported access became local-first or BYOK. Providers include OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, DeepSeek, Groq, xAI, OpenRouter, and custom OpenAI-compatible endpoints. Local runtimes include Ollama, LM Studio, and vLLM.

Refact’s model foundation is the Refact 1.6B Code LLM, trained for 20 programming languages with a 4,096-token context window. The company says it used permissively licensed code and open text, released the weights on Hugging Face, and offered the model for commercial use under the BigScience OpenRAIL-M license. The March 10, 2025 update added Claude 3.7 Sonnet, MCP, o3-mini planning, rollback, and direct patching; it also reported offline and local model support with related model updates. The Agent became available to all users on January 31, 2025, supporting autonomous planning, execution, testing, and repository work. A May 2025 company test reported 59.7 percent on SWE-bench Lite across 179 tasks using Refact Agent with Claude 3.7. The model weights alone do not make every platform component open source.

Refact Cloud historically offered Free at $0 and Pro from $10 per month. Free included limited daily Autonomous Agent use, 32,000-context IDE chat, unlimited Qwen2.5-Coder completions, and a code-aware vector database for repository retrieval. Pro provided 40 Agent requests daily, unlimited 64,000-context chat, and additional completion models. The May 2025 coin system listed 5,000 one-time Free coins, 10,000 monthly Pro coins with unused coins rolling over, and top-ups starting at $5, with $1 equal to 1,000 coins. BYOK and local models consumed no Refact coins. These prices are historical because Refact Cloud closed April 30, 2026. The continuing local-first project has no Refact-issued credits or hosted subscription prices. Users instead pay external model providers or infrastructure costs when those apply.

The main limitation is operational: Refact Cloud shut down on April 30, 2026, ending managed accounts, hosted credits, and paid cloud subscriptions. Users now configure provider keys, local runtimes such as Ollama, LM Studio, or vLLM, or custom OpenAI-compatible endpoints, then maintain installations and review applicable licenses. The legacy self-hosting repository is archived under a BSD-3-Clause license, although development moved to another repository. GitHub Copilot remains a managed service, Cursor focuses on an integrated editor, and Continue offers another local or BYOK route. Refact supports providers including OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, DeepSeek, Groq, xAI, and OpenRouter, giving users control over model selection and execution location. Refact’s terms restrict commercial use of its service, plugin, and model materials without express written consent, while its Refact 1.6B weights were released under BigScience OpenRAIL-M. Pick Refact if local control matters more than a maintained hosted subscription.