Windsurf Is Now Devin Desktop: What It Actually Costs

If you open Windsurf today, the local agent you have used for the past year stops working. Cascade, the engine that made Windsurf what it was, reaches end of life on July 1, 2026, replaced by something called Devin Local. If that is news to you, you are not alone: the product quietly became Devin Desktop a month ago, and most of the coverage since has focused on the name change, not the bill.

Here is the part that actually matters if you pay for this tool. The sticker price did not move at the rebrand. But the shape of what you are paying for did, and the difference is the kind that shows up on a credit card statement three months from now, not on the pricing page today.

How it got here

Windsurf did not become Devin Desktop overnight. It took a year, and the sequence matters more than any single date, because each step narrowed who owns the product and what “your plan” actually includes.

Did the price change when Windsurf became Devin Desktop?

No, not at the rebrand itself. Cognition’s own announcement states plainly: “Your plan, pricing, extensions, and other features remain the same: Devin Desktop is a new look for the product you already love.” The price that changed, changed on March 18, 2026, months before the rebrand, when the credit-pool system was replaced with quotas.

That earlier change is the one worth understanding, because it explains why “nothing changed today” is technically true and still misleading.

The plan ladder actually got rebuilt, not just repriced

Before the quota system, a Windsurf Pro subscriber paid $15 a month for a pool of 500 user-prompt credits and 1,500 flow-action credits, roughly 2,000 total actions to spend however that month went. Above that, the Pro Ultimate tier ran $60 a month for unlimited prompts and 3,000 flow-action credits. It was a simple product: pay a flat rate, spend a fixed pool, top up with Flex credits if you ran out.

That ladder does not exist anymore. In Cognition’s own pricing-change announcement, the company said the new plans “replace the current credit-based system with industry-standard quotas” and, notably, that it would “grandfather in your current plan price indefinitely” for existing paid subscribers migrating over, plus a free extra week on the old plan to test the new quotas before committing. New signups did not get that protection. Under Devin’s current pricing, Pro is $20 a month with a larger but still-capped quota, and Max is $200 a month, ten times the Pro price, a tier that has no equivalent in the old $15/$60 structure at all.

Windsurf's plan ladder, before and after

Item	Old ladder (credit pool)	Current ladder (quota)
Free	$0	$0
Pro	$15	$20
Pro Ultimate / Max	$60	$200

A ladder that adds a $200 rung where a $60 one used to be is not a price increase in the way a $15-to-$16 bump is. It is a different product line, aimed at a different kind of usage, wearing the same plan names.

The part that will actually cost you: Devin Cloud on the Pro plan

Here is what nobody covering the rebrand as a name change is pricing out. Devin’s Pro plan now includes Devin Cloud access: the autonomous, cloud-run agent that used to be Cognition’s separate, enterprise-leaning product, for the same $20 a month a purely local Windsurf editor used to cost. Extra usage beyond the plan’s quota bills “at API pricing,” and Cognition’s own billing documentation confirms its Enterprise tier is metered in ACUs, Agentic Computing Units, a normalized measure of the VM time, model inference, and bandwidth an autonomous agent run consumes. Cognition has not published the Pro-tier ACU-to-dollar overage rate, and that gap is itself the point.

A local code-completion tool has a cost ceiling: it runs when you are typing, and it stops when you close the laptop. An autonomous cloud agent does not have that ceiling. It keeps working, keeps consuming ACUs, for as long as you leave it a task to do. Bundling that capability into the same flat $20 a purely local product used to cost does not raise the sticker price. It changes what “using the product as intended” can cost once you actually use the feature that is now included.

This is the same pattern this site keeps finding in why the cheaper-looking AI option can cost more to actually finish a task: the number on the pricing page and the number on the invoice answer different questions. Here, the pricing page answer is “$20, unchanged.” The invoice answer depends entirely on whether you touch the metered half of what $20 now buys.

The sticker price did not move at the rebrand. What got bundled into it did.

What breaks today if you do nothing

Cascade’s retirement is not a pricing story, but it is the one part of this with a hard deadline, and it is today.

• CI pipelines and automation that invoke Cascade by name stop working until repointed to Devin Local. If a build script, a pre-merge check, or a cron job calls the old agent directly, today is the day it fails.
• Keybindings, extensions, and MCP connections carry over automatically, per Cognition’s announcement, so most day-to-day editor usage needs no action.
• Devin Local is not a drop-in behavior match. It is a from-scratch Rust rewrite, not a patched version of Cascade, so workflows tuned to Cascade’s specific quirks may behave differently even though the interface looks the same.
• Devin Desktop now supports the Agent Client Protocol (ACP), an open standard, which means Codex, Claude Agent, and OpenCode can run inside the editor as first-class agents alongside Devin Local. That is a genuine expansion of what the $20 plan can do, not a cost, and it is worth knowing about if you have been paying for a second tool’s CLI just to get its agent into your workflow.

Should you be worried about your bill?

If you use Windsurf, now Devin Desktop, the way most individual developers used Windsurf, opening the editor, writing code, letting the local agent handle inline edits and small tasks, nothing about today changes your bill. The $20 Pro price is the same $20 it was in May. Cascade retiring is a migration, not a charge.

The bill risk is specific and narrow: it shows up only if you start running Devin Cloud for autonomous, unattended work, because that is the part of the plan billed like a metered cloud product rather than a flat-rate editor. Treat the included quota as a hard budget until Cognition publishes the actual overage rate, the same discipline worth applying to any coding agent’s cost per finished task rather than its monthly sticker. For the wider field this sits in, the 2026 AI coding agent landscape covers how the other tools price the same trade-off, and SpaceX’s acquisition of Cursor is the closest recent parallel: an ownership change that left the sticker price alone while quietly moving the parts of the product that actually decide the bill.

Frequently asked questions

Is Windsurf still called Windsurf?

No. Cognition rebranded Windsurf to Devin Desktop on June 2, 2026. Existing installs updated automatically over the air, with accounts, plans, extensions, and keybindings preserved.

Did Windsurf pricing change when it became Devin Desktop?

Not at the rebrand itself. Cognition's announcement states plan, pricing, and features "remain the same." The price that changed happened on March 18, 2026, months before the rebrand, when Windsurf replaced its $15/month credit-pool Pro plan with a $20/month quota system and added a $200/month Max tier. Existing paid subscribers were grandfathered at their old price indefinitely.

What happened to Cascade?

Cascade, the local agent that powered Windsurf, reached end of life on July 1, 2026. Devin Local, a from-scratch Rust rewrite that Cognition says is up to 30% more token-efficient and adds subagents, replaces it as the default local agent.

Does Devin Desktop cost more than Windsurf did?

The Pro plan is still $20 a month, the same price set when Windsurf moved off its old credit-pool system. What changed is what that $20 includes: Devin Cloud, a metered autonomous-agent product, is now bundled into Pro, with overage billed at an unpublished API rate. Purely local, editor-based usage costs the same as before.

What do I need to do before Cascade shuts off?

Repoint any CI pipeline, script, or automation that calls Cascade directly to Devin Local before today. Editor settings, extensions, keybindings, and MCP connections carry over automatically and need no action.

Sources

• Cognition. (2025). Cognition’s acquisition of Windsurf [company announcement]. cognition.com/blog/windsurf
• TechCrunch. (2025). Cognition, maker of the AI coding agent Devin, acquires Windsurf [news report]. techcrunch.com/2025/07/14/cognition-maker-of-the-ai-coding-agent-devin-acquires-windsurf
• Cognition / Devin. (2026). Windsurf is now Devin Desktop [company announcement]. devin.ai/blog/windsurf-is-now-devin-desktop
• Cognition / Devin. (2026). Introducing our new Windsurf pricing plans [company announcement, March 18, 2026]. devin.ai/blog/windsurf-pricing-plans
• Devin. (2026). Plans and Pricing [vendor documentation]. devin.ai/pricing
• Devin. (2026). Billing [vendor documentation; ACU metering]. docs.devin.ai/admin/billing