AI Coding Tools That Killed Their Free Tiers in 2026 (And What Still Works)
Four AI coding tools quietly shut down their free tiers in 2026. Here's the exact timeline for Tabnine, Augment Code, Gemini Code Assist, and Sourcegraph Cody, plus what to switch to.
Contents6
Free tiers in AI coding tools are not a permanent feature. They're a customer-acquisition cost, and once a vendor has enough enterprise revenue locked in, the free plan is usually the first thing to go. 2026 has been an unusually active year for that specific kind of bad news. Here's a plain timeline of what actually died, when, and where those users landed.
Tabnine: free tier gone in two stages
Tabnine removed its free individual tier on April 2, 2025, then finished the job by sunsetting the paid Dev plan too, releasing version 5.24.0 on October 16, 2025 and eliminating the individual plan entirely. As of today, Tabnine has no free or individual option of any kind: it's Code Assistant at $39/user/month or the Agentic Platform at $59/user/month, both aimed squarely at enterprise teams and both requiring annual billing.
If you were using Tabnine specifically for its on-premises, air-gapped privacy model, that positioning hasn't changed, you just now pay enterprise prices for it from day one.
Augment Code: individual plans retired, business-only now
Augment Code's Indie ($20/mo) and Standard ($60/mo) individual credit tiers were retired in June 2026. What's left is a single Business plan at $100/month flat, covering up to 50 seats with $100 of pooled usage included, plus a custom Enterprise tier. There's no free trial and no plan below Business. If you were a solo developer on Indie, Augment simply isn't priced for you anymore.
Gemini Code Assist: a hard cutoff, no wind-down
This is the most abrupt one. Starting June 18, 2026, Gemini Code Assist's IDE extensions stopped serving requests entirely for individual accounts, including Google AI Pro and Google AI Ultra subscribers, and the same cutoff hit Gemini CLI. There was no grace period and no way to keep using the old sign-in. Organizations on a Gemini Code Assist Standard or Enterprise license kept access unchanged, but everyone else got redirected toward Google's newer Antigravity platform, which unifies several of Google's coding tools into one multi-agent product.
Sourcegraph Cody: replaced by its own successor
Sourcegraph stopped taking new signups for Cody Free and Cody Pro on June 25, 2025, then fully discontinued both plans on July 23, 2025, giving existing users about a month's notice. Cody Enterprise was unaffected and remains actively developed. For individual developers, Sourcegraph's answer wasn't "go find something else," it was "use our new tool instead": the company launched Amp as its replacement agentic coding product for people who don't need an enterprise seat.
What that leaves you with
| Tool | Free tier status | What's still there |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub Copilot | Active | 2,000 completions + 50 chat requests/month |
| Cursor | Active | 2,000 completions, 50 slow premium requests, 2-week Pro trial |
| Devin Desktop (formerly Windsurf) | Active | Unlimited Tab completions, light daily agent quota |
| Cline | Active, permanent | Fully open source; you only pay your model provider for tokens |
| Amazon Q Developer | Active | Unlimited completions, 50 agentic requests/month |
| Tabnine | Gone | Enterprise-only, from $39/user/mo |
| Augment Code | Gone | Business-only, $100/mo flat for up to 50 seats |
| Gemini Code Assist (individual) | Gone | Migrate to Antigravity or a paid Gemini API key |
| Sourcegraph Cody (individual) | Gone | Replaced by Amp |
The pattern across all four casualties is the same: a vendor builds a following on a genuinely useful free tier, then narrows the business toward whichever segment actually pays, usually enterprise seats. None of these companies are struggling, Cognition just raised at a $10.2 billion valuation off the back of the Windsurf deal, and Sourcegraph didn't shut down, it just rebuilt its individual product under a new name. The free tier was never the business. It was the funnel.
What to actually do about it
If you're on one of the four dead free tiers, don't wait for a comeback. Cline is the closest thing to a true no-catch option right now since it's fully open source and you only pay for whatever LLM you point it at, including free local models if your hardware can run them. If you want a polished, closed-source editor experience instead, both Cursor and Devin Desktop still run genuinely useful free plans, though Devin Desktop's underlying agent quota isn't published as a hard number the way Cursor's is.
For a deeper look at what changed with Windsurf specifically, see our [full Devin Desktop rebrand breakdown](/blog/windsurf-is-now-devin-desktop-what-changed-for-free-tier-users), and our [Cursor tool page](/tools/cursor) for its current plan details. We also track every method that's stopped working across the site on our [Retired Methods page](/autopsy), which is worth a periodic check before you build a workflow around any single free tier.