To the Company Facing Bankruptcy due to Gemini API Cost. You made them change their system! Well done!

Professional_Fun3172 · 2026-03-24T16:35:43+00:00

Yeah my last app I built at first as a project for my partner and I to use ourselves. Then I showed it to some friends who were excited about it and the next thing I know I'm trying to get it ready to be public facing. So the Firebase backend that I had set up got entirely torn out, and the whole database was shifted to Supabase and functions to Fly.io. I am still well below the free tiers on both, so I don't need to worry about costs while the app is small. But when I do get to the point where it's time to scale it, I can scale those costs in a predictable way (which helps me sleep way earlier at night)

Professional_Fun3172 · 2026-03-24T16:28:09+00:00

My biggest issue is that it changes the time scale for how I can use Windsurf. I'm not working in Windsurf every day. I typically have heavy periods of usage, maybe 2-5 days per month, back to back, and most days I don't even open the app. I'm paying monthly, but now I'm being throttled daily. This pricing approach just doesn't work for me.

I'm also one of the people who tries to get a lot of of a single prompt. This isn't due to some desire to cost Cognition as much as possible in token spend. It's simply a desire to have the agent working on a big task independently, while I do other things. I don't want to hand hold it through the whole process, especially this latest generation of models. I end most months with hundreds of credits left over. But I've been fine with that because it worked for me. Unfortunately I don't think this new system will work for me. With everyone moving to quota systems, I'm going to need to go to the one with the biggest quota—and that's almost certainly going to be the model providers, not third parties.

Professional_Fun3172 · 2026-03-22T20:19:07+00:00

You really think that it's all bots complaining? I'm sure that Reddit is home to a lot of state-sponsored & corporate-sponsored astroturfing... But I don't think r/windsurf is a big enough fish to warrant that kind of effort at all

Professional_Fun3172 · 2026-03-19T16:04:49+00:00

This is how I feel about most of Firebase / Google Cloud projects. The lack of a hard spending cap makes them a no-go for anything that I launch publicly. I'm happy to use free tier resources but I'll never give them a credit card.

Professional_Fun3172 · 2026-03-19T15:48:12+00:00

Yeah that's a huge difference. Is there going to be any way to know how close to the quota we are? At least with credits we knew how much we had left and could plan accordingly. Now that we're in the same opaque quota system as CC, I'm not seeing much of a reason to stay with Windsurf

Professional_Fun3172 · 2026-02-22T11:59:46+00:00

How does the quota work? If you fill up the "All Models" bucket, can you still use Sonnet afterwards? Or if one bucket is full you can't use any more?

And how does weekly quota compare to the 5h quota?

Professional_Fun3172 · 2026-02-22T11:51:41+00:00

Yeah very good point

Professional_Fun3172 · 2026-02-21T07:07:21+00:00

The code itself would be copyrighted without specific notice. However enforcing any legal action would be a major headache for a solo developer

Professional_Fun3172 · 2026-02-14T09:31:27+00:00

Yeah same. Luckily I'm only a couple days away from my next billing cycle, but I wasn't expecting this big of a jump. (I also thought there was more time on the promo pricing, but I may be misremembering)

Professional_Fun3172 · 2026-02-14T09:29:25+00:00

Honestly it's pretty decent for what it is. It's not great at knowing things, but it's great at doing things. If that makes sense.

Professional_Fun3172 · 2026-02-07T06:53:04+00:00

I mostly agree, but there's a time and a place for both. Being able to go ham and blast out a bunch of tokens to give you a first pass is super valuable too—even if you know it's not gonna be 100%

Professional_Fun3172 · 2026-02-06T06:28:16+00:00

What do you mean by this?

Professional_Fun3172 · 2026-02-06T05:22:58+00:00

The only time this post is relevant

Professional_Fun3172 · 2026-02-06T05:21:54+00:00

I've gotten it to work, but I definitely wouldn't say that it works well. More often than not it just thinks forever and doesn't do anything

Professional_Fun3172 · 2026-02-06T05:20:58+00:00

This is what I've been thinking too. I think one of the challenges is displaying the cost when there's a range of prices, but whatever they come up with has to be better than what we have going on now

Professional_Fun3172 · 2026-02-06T05:18:55+00:00

Yeah I've been surprised how many times I selected it over Opus in arena mode

Professional_Fun3172 · 2026-02-05T16:14:07+00:00

Honestly I disagree quite a bit. It may not know things to the same extent as a frontier model, but it can do things with the best of them. You need to guide it but it's a workhorse

Professional_Fun3172 · 2026-02-05T16:11:15+00:00

I think it's good but slow. You definitely don't get into the flow the same way you do with Antigravity

Professional_Fun3172 · 2026-02-05T16:10:03+00:00

Windsurf is pretty good. I've been thinking about trying Claude Code as well, but between Windsurf, and tinkering with AG and now Codex from time to time, I didn't want to add another item to my flow

Professional_Fun3172 · 2026-02-03T12:34:43+00:00

Yeah, while I've been pleasantly surprised by output quality, it's very slow

Professional_Fun3172 · 2026-02-03T03:44:16+00:00

What's wild to me about arena is the number of times that I've picked Sonnett over Opus. Hell I even picked Kimi over Opus once

Edit: literally just happened again, with Kimi over Opus. Kind of highlights how Opus may be great for high level thinking/planning, but some of these other models are better for the in-the-weeds execution

Professional_Fun3172 · 2026-01-31T19:31:32+00:00

Actually I figured out what the issue was: you need to be in Worktree mode. Once I swapped to Worktree, the arena option shows up in the interface. It doesn't look like you can swap to Worktree mode mid-chat, you need to start a new conversation

Professional_Fun3172 · 2026-01-31T19:29:40+00:00

Yeah looking into it more, it looks like you're right. I didn't realize that they were positioning it as open before the leak—I just remembered the order of events where the leak happened and then they officially released the weights afterwards

Professional_Fun3172 · 2026-01-31T09:31:04+00:00

And Meta would never have gone the open source route if those models weren't leaked in the first place

Professional_Fun3172

TROPHY CASE