Cursor Alternatives That Actually Work (And Won't Bankrupt You)

Yeah, the $300+ monthly bills were the last straw, but honestly? Cursor had been pissing me off for months before that.

The problem isn't that it's expensive - lots of dev tools are expensive. The problem is you're paying premium prices for what amounts to fancy autocomplete that occasionally hallucinates bugs into your codebase.

I remember the exact moment I decided to switch. It was like 11:30 at night, I was trying to push a hotfix for our payment system, and Cursor kept "helpfully" refactoring my database query. The one that was already working. The one that had been working for 6 months.

But Cursor knew better, right? It suggested this "optimized" version that looked cleaner. Except it introduced a race condition that randomly failed payment confirmations. Took me until 2 AM to figure out why transactions were getting lost.

That bug made it to production for like 45 minutes or an hour, whatever, before I caught it. In those 45 minutes or whatever, we lost maybe 30 payments - probably 7 or 8 grand, could've been more, hard to tell. Could've been way worse if it happened during peak hours.

Here's what really got me: when I looked at the "optimization" Cursor made, it was the kind of mistake a junior dev might make. But I trusted it because, hey, it's AI, it must know what it's doing. That's the dangerous part - these tools make you second-guess your own working code.

The Credit System Is A Scam

OK, let me rant about Cursor's pricing for a second. They don't just charge you monthly - they burn through "credits" based on what you're doing. Simple autocomplete? Cheap. Ask it to refactor a whole file? There go your credits.

The fucked up part is they never tell you how much something costs until after you've used it. It's like having a taxi with no meter that just hands you a bill at the end. I'd blow through most of my monthly allocation in like 2 or 3 days, then get to choose between paying overage fees or going back to regular VS Code for the rest of the month. Happened to me like 4 times before I gave up.

And their "Pro" tier? Don't even get me started. It's like 20 bucks a month per user, which sounds reasonable until you realize that's on top of whatever you spend on credits. A 5-person team is looking at hundreds per month easy, maybe over a grand depending on usage.

Compare that to GitHub Copilot at 10 bucks a month per user, flat rate, unlimited usage. Sure, Copilot isn't as fancy, but at least I know what my bill's gonna be.

The Real Cost: Time Spent Debugging AI Suggestions

But you know what costs more than the subscription fees? The time you waste cleaning up after these AI assistants.

I started keeping track after the payment system incident. Every time Cursor suggested something that looked good but was actually broken, I logged it. In a typical week, I probably spent 2-3 hours fixing problems that Cursor created. Not my problems - problems that literally didn't exist until Cursor "helped." That's like half a day per week debugging AI suggestions instead of building actual features.

That's 2-3 hours per week I could've been writing new features or fixing actual bugs. Instead, I'm debugging AI-generated code that looked right but wasn't.

The worst part? The suggestions are just good enough that you don't immediately spot the issues. It's not like the old days when autocomplete would suggest obviously wrong variable names. These tools generate syntactically correct, logically reasonable code that happens to be wrong in subtle ways.

What I Actually Needed vs What I Got

Looking back, here's what I actually wanted from an AI coding tool:

• Smart autocomplete for the boring stuff (importing modules, basic syntax)
• Help with unfamiliar APIs or libraries
• Quick explanations when I'm looking at someone else's code
• Maybe some refactoring suggestions that I can easily review

What Cursor gave me instead:

• Aggressive rewrites of working code
• Overly clever "optimizations" that weren't optimizations
• Suggestions that assumed I didn't know what I was doing
• A credit system designed to maximize billing

Most of the alternatives I tried got this balance better. They're less ambitious, which turns out to be exactly what I wanted.

After dealing with Cursor's bullshit for too long, I ended up settling on a combination of tools. Yeah, I know, that sounds like more work, but hear me out.

GitHub Copilot: The Reliable Workhorse

I ended up going back to Copilot, and honestly? It's fine. It's not exciting, it doesn't try to be clever, it just does basic autocomplete really well.

The best thing about Copilot is it knows when to shut up. It suggests completions for the obvious stuff - imports, basic function signatures, repetitive patterns - but it doesn't try to rewrite your entire architecture while you're not looking.

Had one weird issue where it kept suggesting React class components instead of hooks, but that was probably because I was working on a legacy project with existing class components. Fair enough. Took me a few days to realize I could just ignore those suggestions.

The $10/month flat rate is the real selling point though. No credits, no usage tracking, no surprise bills. I know exactly what I'm paying every month.

Codeium: The Free Alternative That's Actually Good

This one blew my mind. It's basically Copilot but free, and sometimes the suggestions are actually better.

I have no fucking idea how they're making money. Their business model seems to be "give away everything for free and hope enterprise customers pay for hosted versions." Fine by me.

The VS Code extension works great, the suggestions feel natural, and it even has this chat feature that's actually useful for explaining unfamiliar code.

Only complaint is the UI feels a bit janky compared to the polished GitHub stuff. But for free? Can't complain.

Windsurf: The Surprise Winner

OK, so I almost didn't try this one because the name sounds like a shitty startup trying too hard to be cool. But a coworker mentioned it and I figured why not.

Turns out it's actually pretty good at understanding context. Like, better than Cursor in some ways. When I'm working on a React component, it seems to understand the component lifecycle and suggests relevant hooks and state management patterns.

Had this weird bug where it would crash VS Code on startup, but only on my work machine running some specific Node version. Think it was 18.2.0 vs 18.1.4 or some shit like that. Worked fine on my personal laptop. Spent like 2 hours trying to figure that out.

At $15/month it's more expensive than Copilot but still way cheaper than Cursor's credit system. And the suggestions feel more thoughtful somehow.

Tabnine: For The Paranoid (Rightfully So)

If your company is one of those places where everything has to be on-premises and nothing can touch the cloud, Tabnine is probably your best bet.

The suggestions aren't as sophisticated as the cloud-based tools, but that's kind of the point. It runs locally, your code never leaves your machine, and your security team doesn't have to worry about trade secrets ending up in some AI training dataset.

I used it for a few weeks on a client project where they were super paranoid about IP. It was fine. Not amazing, but fine. The local model is obviously not as powerful as the cloud ones, but for basic autocomplete it gets the job done.

What I Actually Use Day-to-Day Now

Most days I just use Copilot. It's boring and reliable, which is exactly what I want from a coding assistant.

For more complex stuff where I need better context understanding, I fire up Windsurf. Usually when I'm working on unfamiliar codebases or trying to understand someone else's architecture.

Codeium is my backup when I'm working on personal projects and don't want to use my work Copilot account for random side projects. Yeah, I know I could just use Copilot for everything, but old habits die hard and I kinda like having options.

The key insight? You don't need one perfect tool. You need tools that don't actively make your life worse, and you can switch between them based on what you're doing.

The Migration Was Easier Than I Thought

Switching from Cursor was basically:

1. Cancel subscription (had to email support, they don't make it easy)
2. Install new VS Code extensions
3. Spend 10 minutes configuring keyboard shortcuts

The hardest part was unlearning some of Cursor's "helpful" behaviors. I kept expecting suggestions to rewrite entire functions when all I wanted was to finish a variable name.

With Copilot and friends, I had to go back to actually thinking about my code instead of just accepting whatever the AI suggested. Turns out that's a good thing.

Performance Comparison: What Actually Matters

Look, I'm not gonna sit here and run benchmarks on autocomplete speed. That's not what matters in real development work.

What matters is:

• Suggestion quality: Are the completions actually helpful?
• Context awareness: Does it understand what I'm trying to do?
• Non-intrusiveness: Does it get in my way or help me work faster?
• Reliability: Does it work consistently or randomly break?

On all these metrics, the simpler tools (Copilot, Codeium) actually perform better than the fancier ones. They're predictable. They don't try to outsmart you.

Cursor felt like having a junior developer looking over your shoulder who occasionally had brilliant insights but mostly just questioned every decision you made. The alternatives feel more like having a really good autocomplete that occasionally surprises you with something useful.

That's the trade-off I was willing to make to stop paying $300+ a month for the privilege of debugging AI suggestions.