Kilocode - Open Source Alternatives to Cursor & Windsurf

AI models are really good at coding and it is one of the most adopted use case in recent years.

It started with simple auto completion but now it is full blown agentic app where you just need to say “what needs to be done” and it does the majority of the work.

Popular proprietary editor/extensions like GitHub Copilot, Cursor, Windsurf and others started with subsidized pricing initially to get users.

And now that they’ve good user base, they started increasing the price (or limiting the usage) which many of are not happy about.

If you want to explore open source alternative then you might like Kilo Code

What is Kilo Code?

It is an open source VS Code extension that has AI coding agent capabilities.

Obviously, you might not get all the features (or shining thing) that you get from other proprietary apps but for it does cover majority of the use cases really well.

Here is a quick demo by the team

Installation

You can install this in VS Code (and also any VS Code forks like Cursor, Windsurf, etc)

👉 https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=kilocode.Kilo-Code

Features

Pricing

• As mentioned before, it is completely open source
• Pay for what you use via them with LLM token pricing exactly matches rates of providers (Anthropic, OpenAI, Google)
  • Or bring your own API keys
• $20 free credits to get you started 🤑

When you sign up, you’ll get $5 and once you add your payment method you’ll get another $15

Note: Since you’ll be paying per usage beware of the token usage when you’re using it.

Pro Tip

If you already have GitHub Copilot subscription you can configure and use it Kilo Code instead of providing configuring your LLM provider.

👉 https://kilocode.ai/docs/providers/vscode-lm

Fun Fact

Kilo Code is a fork of Roo Code which itself is a fork of Cline

Happy AI coding!