Free Windsurf Alternatives That Need No Card (2026)

If you searched for Windsurf today you landed on Devin Desktop: Cognition renamed the editor in June 2026, and the Cascade agent that made it famous reached end-of-life on July 1. That story — timeline, migration, what broke — is covered in what happened to Windsurf, so this page will not repeat it. This page answers the narrower, more practical question: what can I actually use for free instead, right now, without a credit card or a $20 monthly subscription.

The honest answer is that there are three different kinds of "free" here, and they are not interchangeable. There is the free tier of the successor product (real, but thinly quoted). There are free open-source editors and agents that meter nothing until you attach a model — and then you pay per token, which for cheap models works out at pennies. And there are hosted builders with a daily free allowance and no install. Below: one comparison table with every figure traced to published pricing as of September 2026, short verdicts on each, and picks by situation.

TL;DR — the best free Windsurf alternative by situation

Every free tier compared

Numbers below are what each vendor's own pricing page said on 22 September 2026. Where a page says "limited" without a figure, the figure is missing on purpose — I am not guessing at it.

Paid reference points, so you can see where the free tiers sit: Devin Pro and Cursor Pro are both $20/month; Zed Pro is $10/month with "$5 of tokens included"; Kilo Teams is $15/user/month; Devin Teams is $80/month plus $40 per seat.

What "limited" actually means, per tool

The single most useful thing to know about free tiers here is that they meter four different things, and only two of them are predictable.

• Requests. Cursor's Hobby plan caps agent requests without publishing a number. Devin's FAQ is candid that "cost per message varies based on the model used, the task size and complexity, and the reasoning required" — so a light quota is not a fixed number of tasks.
• Accepted outputs. Zed's Personal plan counts accepted edit predictions (2,000), which is a generous ceiling if you mostly use the agent and not completions.
• Tokens. Open-source clients on BYOK move the meter entirely to your provider, which is the only free tier that scales down to near zero.
• Generations. Hosted builders give you a daily count. It resets, it costs nothing to try, and there is no key to manage.

One caution on the token route: OpenCode Zen's documented behavior is "If your balance goes below $5, Zen will automatically reload $20." It is adjustable and can be turned off, but "I signed up for free models" and "I have a stored card with auto-reload on" are two different states. Check which one you are in.

The four picks, in more detail

Devin Desktop Free — the literal continuation

This is the product Windsurf became, and its free tier is real: unlimited inline edits, unlimited Tab completions, a light agent quota, and reduced model availability. Cognition also lists free use of its SWE-2 model inside Devin Desktop and CLI through October 10, 2026, which is the closest thing to a free frontier model in the lineup. What you give up: the quota is thin for agentic work, and the free tier is where Devin's cloud agents are not.

If your workflow was "open the panel, describe the change, review the diff," nothing else on this list is a closer match — and the Devin Desktop tutorial walks the new Agent Command Center if the layout is what's stopping you.

Cursor Hobby — the polished editor with an opaque cap

Cursor's free tier is the most feature-complete editor experience here and explicitly needs no card. The trade-off is blindness: "Limited Agent requests" with no published ceiling means you learn your limit by hitting it. Pro is $20/month with "Extended limits on Agent."

Zed Personal — the editor that gets out of the agent's way

Zed's $0 plan is unusual in this list: the editor is free forever and, per its pricing page, external agents and your own API keys are usable without limit. That inverts the usual question. You are not asking "how much agent do I get for free" but "which agent do I want to point at this editor". If you already have a cheap key, this is the strongest free editor on the page.

opencode, Kilo Code, Cline — the open-source trio

These three are the free-software exit. opencode is a terminal agent whose Zen gateway publishes a list of models at $0 input and $0 output — with the fine print that the free ones are "available on OpenCode for a limited time" while the teams collect feedback. Kilo Code spans VS Code, JetBrains, and CLI and routes to free, BYOK, or local models through Ollama or LM Studio. Cline is free for individual developers and leaves inference to you. None of them gate the client; the meter lives wherever your key lives.

If you want the guided version, see the OpenCode tutorial and the DeepSeek in Cline walkthrough.

Free plus a cheap key beats every free tier

For anything beyond occasional use, the winning combination is a free client plus DeepSeek's API, because the model cost falls below the threshold where a subscription makes sense. Published pricing, per million tokens:

Cache hits on deepseek-flash list at $0.003 per million input tokens off-peak. A small edit-and-test cycle moves a few thousand tokens, so the arithmetic lands well under a cent — the whole argument for the BYOK route. Wiring is two lines in most clients, and DeepSeek publishes both an OpenAI-format and an Anthropic-format base URL:

export ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL=https://api.deepseek.com/anthropic
export ANTHROPIC_API_KEY=sk-your-key

The full terminal wiring is in the DeepSeek harness setup guide, and the editor version is using DeepSeek in Cursor. One naming note from the pricing page itself: the current model names are deepseek-flash and deepseek-v4-pro, and older identifiers "are still accepted, but the corresponding models have been retired" — they are served by the current model and billed at its price. Tutorials written before the change will hand you names that no longer mean what they say.

If you would rather not install anything

Windsurf/Cascade earned users who never wanted an IDE — they wanted to describe an app and watch it appear. That use case has a free path with no key, no install, and no account: DeepSeek Artifacts turns a plain-English prompt into a running React app with a live Sandpack preview, and the result gets a shareable URL. Free daily generations, no credit card, and the code is exportable — the part that matters when you are comparing it against a subscription you might cancel. The same builder is listed on the pricing page against the paid options.

Who should pick what

• Student or hobbyist, zero budget: Zed Personal or Cursor Hobby as the editor, Gemini CLI for the free model access, opencode's free-priced models in the terminal.
• Ex-Windsurf user who wants the same feel: Devin Desktop Free, then decide whether $20 is worth it after a week of real use.
• Someone who already pays for an API: Kilo Code or Cline, BYOK. This is the cheapest agentic setup on the page once the model is DeepSeek-class.
• Privacy or offline requirement: Zed or Kilo Code pointed at a local model through Ollama or LM Studio — the only genuinely uncapped option here.
• Building web apps, not maintaining a repo: the no-install builder route, or the broader list in free vibe coding tools.

FAQ

Does Windsurf still have a free tier? The product was renamed Devin Desktop in June 2026, so the current free tier is the one Cognition lists at devin.ai/pricing: a light agent quota, limited model availability, unlimited inline edits, and unlimited Tab completions. The old Windsurf quota is not a thing you can sign up for.

Is Cursor's free plan enough to work in? It requires no card and includes agent access and Composer, but Cursor publishes no request count for Hobby. If you need predictability, pick a plan that states its allowance or use a BYOK client where you set the ceiling yourself.

Is there a free tier that does not require a credit card? Of the tools compared here, Cursor's Hobby plan says "No credit card required" outright, and Zed states the same for its trial. Kilo Code and Cline are free extensions you install without payment; the card question moves to whichever API provider you attach.

Can I use a DeepSeek key instead of a subscription? Yes, in Zed, Kilo Code, Cline, and opencode. Zed's page advertises "Unlimited use with your API keys or external agents", and Kilo's free row covers BYOK and local models. DeepSeek's flash model starts at $0.15 per million input tokens off-peak, which is what makes this the cheapest serious setup.

What is closest to the old Cascade experience for free? Devin Desktop's free tier, because it is the same editor with a new agent in the panel. For the terminal equivalent, opencode with a free-priced model gets you agent-style editing without paying for a seat.

Are these free tiers going to change? Assume yes. Model names, quotas, and promotional free tiers move constantly — Devin's own SWE-2 offer has an end date of October 2026, and OpenCode labels several free models as temporary. Re-check the pricing page named in this article before you commit to a workflow, and prefer setups where the exit is a key you own.

Related

• What happened to Windsurf? — the rename timeline, Cascade's end of life, and migration steps
• Devin Desktop tutorial — the editor Windsurf became, walkthrough
• Windsurf tutorial — the Cascade-era workflow, kept online as a record
• DeepSeek harness setup guide — wire any agent to a per-token model
• Free vibe coding tools — the no-install side of the same question
• AGENTS.md template library — the instruction file to carry with you to whichever tool survives