Freebuff vs Devin: a full free day vs a light quota you have to wait out

Devin is Cognition’s autonomous coding agent, and since June it also includes Devin Desktop, the editor that used to be Windsurf. It is ambitious, but its free plan is a quota it does not size, and the cheap pay-as-you-go plan is gone. If you want a coding agent you can use all day for free, with an allowance you can actually see, Freebuff is the better choice.

At a glance

What Devin costs

Per Devin’s pricing page, Free is a "Light quota to code with agents" with "Limited model availability". Pro is $20 a month and Max $200, and each paid plan’s allowance "refreshes automatically on a daily and weekly basis", with extra usage bought at API pricing. Its quota docs tell free users who run out to "Wait until your next daily or weekly reset."

In April 2026, Cognition retired its Core plan: "If you’re on Core today, you’ll move to Free", and Free "does not preserve the old no-minimum pay-as-you-go structure". In the same post it said it was "beginning to charge for products that have been free until now", naming Ask Devin, DeepWiki and Devin Review.

What Freebuff gives you for free

• Unlimited messages in every session. A session lasts an hour, and the agent can read, edit, test and retry as many times as it needs inside it.
• A published daily allowance with no monthly cap. Up to 30 hours a day in the US, and 21 in countries such as Canada, the UK and Germany. That is 10 hours a day of DeepSeek V4.1 Flash, refilled every day. You can see the number before you start.
• Models that do not use it. Right now, Solar Mini 4 and Solar Pro 4 never touch your allowance, and new accounts in the US and other top-tier countries also get DeepSeek V4.1 Flash Fast without touching it.
• Everywhere you work. The CLI, a desktop app for Mac, Windows and Linux, the web workspace, and apps for iOS and Android.

What Devin users are saying

Devin Desktop’s Trustpilot page, still under windsurf.com, scores 1.4 out of 5 from 58 reviews in the last year. Devin’s own page has only a few reviews, but they match:

• A daily quota in one task. May 2026: "after ONE SINGLE TASK of maybe 5-10 minutes", the reviewer’s daily quota was used up and their weekly quota was at half.
• $10 for one prompt. April 2026: "I burned $10 on a single simple Opus 4.6 prompt."
• Hours for broken code. October 2026, on devin.ai: "I have just spent 3 hours on one task and it handed me back broken code with errors galore".
• Support that doesn’t answer. May 2026: "I contacted their support multiple times regarding a subscription and billing issue, but only received automated replies." September, from a team on a legacy plan: "We cannot renew, or contact chat support".
• Still unconvinced. On Hacker News in September: "Devin is still bad, in spite of VC money spent on its development".
• Slow on security. In 2025, researcher Johann Rehberger showed that Devin could be "tricked to download malware and launch it", and wrote that his questions to Cognition "remain unanswered after 120+ days".

What Freebuff users are saying

Where Devin is strong

Devin is built for teams: cloud sessions with their own VMs, a desktop app, a CLI and PR review, plus Slack, Linear and Jira. One Hacker News user who uses it heavily called it "one of the best cloud-hosted, team-managed coding agents". Its free plan keeps unlimited Tab completions, and Cognition says its own SWE-2 model is now a permanent free part of its paid plans. For a funded team that wants agents in the cloud, it is a serious option.

Our verdict

Pick Freebuff. Devin’s free plan is a quota it does not size, free users who run out can only wait, and the cheap pay-as-you-go plan is gone. Freebuff gives you unlimited messages in every session and a published allowance that refills every day.