A cheap Windsurf alternative without credits or limits

A subscription-and-credit model works well for the provider's billing, but it's unpredictable for the user. You pay a fixed monthly fee that includes a certain bundle of "credits" or premium requests to powerful models. In practice, this leads to three typical problems.

• Credits run out mid-month. Agent mode and autocomplete burn through requests quickly — a single complex task can "eat" dozens of premium calls. Once the bundle is exhausted, you either top up or get switched to a weaker model until the next cycle begins.
• The opaque "credit = tokens" mapping. With a credit model, it's hard to tell exactly how much compute you're getting for your money. One "request" for a big task with a long context costs the same number of credits as a short question — even though the actual compute usage differs many times over. You're paying for an abstract unit, not for the actual amount of work.
• Rate and volume limits. Under heavy use, you can hit daily caps on completions or get throttled. For a developer who keeps an AI assistant running all workday long, this means the tool "switches off" at the worst possible moment.

The root of the problem is that a subscription averages everything out: light users overpay for unused credits, while heavy users hit the ceiling and pay extra. Pay-as-you-go eliminates that averaging: you pay exactly for the tokens you processed, and you never hit an artificial "bundle" limit.

A familiar scenario: you kick off agent mode for a big refactor, the agent takes a few dozen steps, and midway through the task a notification pops up that this month's premium requests are exhausted. Your options are limited — top up right now, switch to a stripped-down model that handles your code worse, or put the work off. Any of these breaks your working rhythm. The more actively you use the tool, the more often you hit that ceiling — the paradox of the subscription model is that it punishes its most engaged users.

Important: we're not saying Windsurf is a bad product. It's a quality IDE with a well-thought-out agent mode. But if your only complaint is price, credits and limits, you don't need to change your entire workflow. You just need to change the source of the model — to a cheap, transparent API with pay-as-you-go billing.

Most AI editors under the hood access the same large language models (LLM) via a standard API. Windsurf wraps this access into a subscription. But there is another way: use an editor client that can connect to any OpenAI-compatible endpoint and point it to an inexpensive API.

JoinGonka Gateway is an OpenAI-compatible gateway to the decentralized Gonka network, where GPUs of independent hosts around the world perform real AI inference. Key differences from the subscription model:

• Pay-as-you-go. The price is $0.0069 per 1M input tokens and $0.021 for output. No fixed monthly fees, no "expiring" credits. If you process 5M tokens in a day, you pay $0.024.
• No limits on the number of requests. You don't hit a daily completion cap — the only limit is your balance, which you top up as needed.
• Frontier models. Via the Gateway, you get access to MiniMax M2.7, DeepSeek V4 Flash, and GLM-5.3 Flash — modern open models competitive in coding tasks, all at the same price of $0.0069/1M.
• Compatibility with familiar editors. Any client that supports a custom OpenAI base URL works with the Gateway: Cursor, Cline, Continue.dev, VS Code extensions, and also CLI tools like Claude Code.

In other words, you keep your familiar workflow (editor, autocomplete, chat, agent) but change the billing: instead of a subscription with credits, you get transparent pay-per-token billing. For most developers, this means the monthly bill drops from dozens of dollars to cents, and limits disappear entirely.

If you want to start without an initial investment, 3M free tokens are credited upon registration, enough for your first requests. This is sufficient to test the setup on real tasks before topping up your balance.

The main difference is not in the unit price, but in the payment model itself. A subscription charges a fixed fee and limits usage with credits; pay-as-you-go charges only for actual consumption and does not limit the number of requests. Let's compare the approaches:

To gauge the price range, it is useful to compare token costs from proprietary providers used by subscription-based AI-IDEs with Gonka's pricing. Below are approximate prices per 1M tokens (input/output):

The difference in inference cost is three to four orders of magnitude. With typical active development (a few million tokens per day), a subscription with premium GPT-level requests costs tens of dollars per month with the risk of hitting a limit, whereas the same volume via Gonka costs cents—without a cap. This math is exactly what makes pay-as-you-go an attractive alternative once credits run out.

Let's calculate using a concrete example. Suppose you are coding actively with an AI assistant and consuming about 7M tokens per day—a realistic figure for a developer who keeps autocompletion and chat enabled for 4-6 hours. Over 20 working days, that's approximately 140M tokens per month. Via JoinGonka Gateway at $0.0099/1M, this would cost $2.01 per month. With a proprietary provider at the GPT-5.5 level (if you were paying for tokens directly), the same volume would cost hundreds of dollars. A Windsurf subscription averages this cost to a fixed amount—but only until you stay within the credit bundle. As soon as you exceed it (which an active developer does), extra charges or degradation to weaker models begin. Pay-as-you-go removes this ceiling: 140M, 300M, or 1B tokens—the unit price does not change, there is no limit.

For a team, the effect scales linearly. Five developers on a subscription means five fixed payments plus the risk that each hits their credit limit during the busiest sprint. The same five people on a shared Gonka balance pay a total of cents/dollars per month and are never blocked by a limit. For a startup or an indie team, this is the difference between "AI assistant as a budget item that must be rationed" and "AI assistant that is simply always on."

A disclaimer on fairness: MiniMax M2.7, DeepSeek V4 Flash, and GLM-5.3 Flash are strong open models, but for specific complex coding tasks, top proprietary models may still provide slightly better results. The question is price/performance ratio: for a thousand-fold cost difference, open models on the Gonka network cover the vast majority of everyday tasks—autocompletion, refactoring, test generation, and code explanation.

Switching doesn't mean giving up the editor you know — you just point your client at the JoinGonka Gateway. First, get a key:

1. Sign up at gate.joingonka.ai/register — registration credits you with 3M free tokens.
2. In your Dashboard, open the API Keys section and create a key. It starts with jg-, for example jg-abc123def456.

Next comes the connection, depending on your editor. For OpenAI-compatible clients (Cursor, Continue.dev, Cline, VS Code extensions), set two parameters:

Base URL: https://gate.joingonka.ai/v1
API Key:  jg-your-key
Model:    MiniMaxAI/MiniMax-M2.7

If you prefer environment variables (terminal tools, scripts):

export OPENAI_BASE_URL=https://gate.joingonka.ai/v1
export OPENAI_API_KEY=jg-your-key

For tools on the native Anthropic protocol (such as Claude Code), the Gateway supports the /v1/messages endpoint directly — two variables are all you need:

export ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL=https://gate.joingonka.ai
export ANTHROPIC_AUTH_TOKEN=jg-your-key

Step-by-step guides for specific editors: Cursor, Cline, Continue.dev. Once configured, test the connection: send any request in your editor's chat ("write a sorting function in Python") — if you get a response, everything works. The first request may take 5-10 seconds due to a cold start of the node on the network; subsequent ones are faster.

Possible errors. A 401 Unauthorized response means the key is invalid or inactive — check that it starts with jg- and is active in the Dashboard. A 404 Not Found response almost always means a forgotten /v1 at the end of the Base URL. If the editor requires you to pick a model from a list, enter the identifier manually: MiniMaxAI/MiniMax-M2.7.

Three frontier models are available via the JoinGonka Gateway, all at the same price — $0.0069/1M tokens. The choice depends on the task:

• DeepSeek V4 Flash — a powerful model with a focus on agentic and tool-based tasks (function calling, multi-step scenarios) and one of the network's longest contexts (380K). Suitable when you need an agent that actively invokes tools and reads large repositories.
• MiniMax M2.7 — a versatile model for everyday work and fast, short responses; it's useful to be able to switch if one model suits your task style better.
• GLM-5.3 Flash — a reasoning model by Z.ai: it "thinks" before answering, making it strong where complex logic needs to be unraveled; it also has the network's longest context (390K) — set the response length limit with a buffer.

Since the price is the same for all three, switching between them costs nothing — experiment and choose the one that yields the best result for your tasks. You can get an up-to-date list of models by sending a GET https://gate.joingonka.ai/v1/models request.

Working tip: for agentic tools (Cline and similar), native tool calling is critical — Gonka models have it, so the agent correctly invokes file reading, command execution, and search. For autocompletion, enable streaming so that the response starts appearing immediately without waiting for full generation.

Do I have to give up my usual editor? No. If your editor supports a custom OpenAI base URL (which Cursor, Cline, Continue.dev, and most VS Code extensions do), you simply change the model provider. The editor itself, keyboard shortcuts, and workflow remain the same.

Do I need to understand cryptocurrency? No. JoinGonka Gateway accepts payment and provides a standard API key — for a developer, it looks like any other AI provider. The GNK cryptocurrency works under the hood, but you don't need to buy tokens or set up a wallet to use the gateway.

How do I top up my balance? We support payments in GNK (no fee), WGNK via Ethereum (1% fee), and USDT (5% fee). Once topped up, tokens are deducted based on actual usage.

Will agent mode still work? Yes, if you are using an agent-based editor client (e.g., Cline) — it works through the Gateway just like it does with any other provider, thanks to native tool calling in Gonka models.

Is it secure? The Gonka network consists of 584 GPUs, a PoUW consensus (useful work instead of idle computing), ~$80M in investments, and a security audit by CertiK. Requests are routed through a decentralized network rather than a single corporate repository.

What if I'm not satisfied with the model quality for a specific task? Switch to another model from our suite (MiniMax M2.7, DeepSeek V4 Flash, GLM-5.3 Flash) — the price is the same. And thanks to OpenAI compatibility, you can switch back to your previous provider at any time by changing a single parameter. There is no vendor lock-in.