DEV Community: Adilaw12

I stopped gating BYOK behind a paywall; here's what changed when I gave away the one thing that costs me nothing

Adilaw12 — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 09:02:39 +0000

A few weeks ago Freebird AI(a free VS Code AI coding extension) required a Pro subscription to use your own API key with Anthropic, OpenAI, DeepSeek, or Qwen. In hindsight, that was backwards; when you bring your own key, the request goes straight from your machine to the provider. Our servers never touch it. We were charging for the one feature that costs us literally nothing, while Continue, Cline, and Roo all give the same thing away free.

So we stopped. BYOK is now free for everyone. Pro's value moved to what actually costs money: unlimited cloud edits on the full model, and Agent mode (multi-file edits, terminal commands, checkpoints, project memory).

That decision opened the door to a few things we shipped this week:

Kimi K3 as a BYOK backend. Moonshot AI's 2.8-trillion-parameter model with a 1M-token context window, via their OpenAI-compatible endpoint. Defaults to the latest (kimi-k3), with the previous generation (kimi-k2) one settings-override away.

A genuine "custom provider" option. Instead of hardcoding every niche API we could think of, there's now a freebird.customBaseUrl setting that points FreebirdAI at any OpenAI-compatible endpoint - OpenRouter, Together, Groq, a self-hosted vLLM or LM Studio server, whatever. Unlike every other backend, there's no sensible default base URL or model name across arbitrary providers, so both are required; the extension throws a clear, specific error instead of silently guessing wrong.

Built-in prompt templates. A new command populates the chat input (doesn't send automatically, you can edit it first) with one of three starting points: a Codebase Cartographer that leans on large context windows to map a project's architecture and spit out a Mermaid diagram, a Security Auditor that's explicitly told to cite concrete exploit scenarios instead of padding the list with theoretical findings, and a Multi-File Test Engineer that reads your existing test suite's conventions before writing anything new.

Also fixed a real bug while auditing the codebase: the free-trial upgrade banner wasn't showing for most free users at all, the only thing that ever un-hid it was sent once at extension activation, before the webview panel actually existed for anyone who hadn't already opened it. Obvious in hindsight, invisible until we went looking.

Freebird is free (20 cloud edits/day, unlimited via Ollama or your own key), $6/mo for Pro if you want unlimited cloud + Agent mode. [Marketplace link] · [GitHub link]

Genuinely curious what people think of the BYOK-free call, and whether the custom-provider option is actually useful in practice or just theoretically nice.

My Copilot Bill Was $60 This Month. Here's What That Says About AI Coding Tools

Adilaw12 — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 11:11:06 +0000

My GitHub Copilot bill this month was $60. I normally pay $10. Nothing about how I code changed; I just used more than whatever Copilot quietly allocated me and found out the difference by looking at my card statement.

That's the story hiding underneath most AI coding tool pricing pages: even when the sticker price looks reasonable, the actual cost is often unpredictable, uncapped, and sometimes discovered after the fact. For a bootstrapped founder watching every dollar, that may be the difference between a tool being safe to build around and one you have to budget defensively against.

I want to say upfront that Cursor and Copilot are good products. This isn't a "why I built an alternative" post that starts by trashing the incumbents. If a surprise $50 swing in your monthly bill isn't a meaningful problem for you, they're genuinely excellent, and you probably don't need to keep reading.

This is for everyone else. And it turns out "everyone else" is a much bigger group than the AI coding tool market seems to have priced for.

The gap nobody's pricing page admits to
Here's the thing that's easy to miss if you've never had to think about it: $20 a month isn't a rounding error everywhere. It's not even $20-a-month-is-a-lot everywhere; it's $20-a-month-is-the-difference-between-using-this-tool-and-not-using-it, for a very large number of developers. Cursor's Business tier runs $40+ per seat. Copilot Business and Enterprise sit in similar territory. And as I found out this month, even the entry-level tiers can quietly cost you multiples of the sticker price the moment your usage doesn't fit the allocation. These are prices and pricing models built for a specific economic context, where a $60 surprise is an inconvenience rather than a real budget problem.

That context isn't universal, and I've watched this exact gap up close: developers just as capable, working on real problems, priced out of tools that are supposedly making everyone more productive. Not because the tools aren't good, but because the pricing model never accounted for them in the first place. That's not a hypothetical concern for me. It's the reason Freebird exists.

Four specific things that don't work

1. Costs are unpredictable and sometimes discovered after the fact. My $60 a month is the small version of this. Usage-based overage billing means you genuinely don't know what a month will cost until it's already billed, which makes it nearly impossible to budget for if you're bootstrapped and every dollar is accounted for in advance.

2. Free tier usually means "free trial with extra steps."
Most tools that advertise a free tier mean something time-limited or crippled: a two-week trial, a handful of completions before the wall goes up, a bait designed to convert you, not to actually be usable long-term. That's a legitimate business model. It's just not the same thing as "free," and calling it that erodes trust with exactly the developers who most need an honest option.

3. Tiered throttling quietly favours whoever pays more.
"Fast request" quotas that slow down or deprioritise lower tiers once you hit a cap are standard practice now. Reasonable for managing infrastructure costs, but it means the same subscription buys a meaningfully different experience depending on how much you're paying, which is a strange thing to discover only after you've committed.

4. There's no real local-only option.
If you want your code to never leave your machine, for a client's IP, a side project you're not ready to expose, or just a default preference, most of these tools simply don't offer that path. Cloud is the only option, full stop.

What we actually built to address this, and what we didn't
I want to be specific here, because I think vague claims are part of what's wrong with this whole space.

Freebird gives you 20 real AI edits a day, free, forever. Not a trial, not a countdown, no usage-based bill waiting to surprise you at the end of the month. It resets every day for as long as you use the extension, and the cost is exactly $0; not "$0 until it isn't." Multi-file agent mode, inline editing, semantic codebase search (find code by what it does, not just by matching keywords), AI-generated commit messages, all in that free tier, no credit card required to start.

If you want unlimited use with zero cost, ever, Ollama support gives you a fully local, fully private option (your code never touches our servers), and there's no bill to be surprised by because there's no billing at all. This isn't a fallback bolted on as an afterthought; it's a first-class path, because "I don't want an unpredictable bill" and "I don't want my code leaving my machine" are both completely legitimate reasons to want this.

If you do want more: unlimited cloud access, your choice of Claude, GPT-4o, or DeepSeek, Freebird AI Pro is a flat $6 a month. The Team option is a flat $25 a month for five seats. Flat, not usage-based, so you know exactly what you'll pay before the month starts, which is the whole point after a $60 surprise.

What we are not claiming is that Freebird matches Cursor feature-for-feature. It doesn't, not yet. Deep, persistent codebase indexing, multi-step checkpoint/rewind, the interface polish that comes from a dedicated design team; Cursor has real advantages there, built by a much larger team over a much longer runway. I'd rather tell you that directly than have you discover it and feel misled. Freebird is a small team's work, closing a specific, real gap; not a large-company-scale product trying to out-feature an incumbent.

Where this is actually landing
The part we didn't expect: without any marketing budget, purely through word of mouth, Freebird has reached developers in more than 20 countries/cities - Paris, Cape Town, Singapore, Mombasa, Addis Ababa, Dhaka, Tamil Nadu, Lagos, and plenty of places in between.

The feedback since launch has been the most useful confirmation that the message resonates. One early user wrote: "Really like the Ollama-first angle, that's what sold me on clicking through." Another said: "Multi-file agent mode actually works without me babysitting it, which was not what I expected. The local Ollama option is a nice touch for keeping side projects private." That's the exact pitch of this article, said back to us by people who owed us nothing and had no reason to be generous about it.

We don't know yet whether this scales into something bigger. What we know is that the gap is real, the demand for honest, predictable pricing is real, and for now, that's enough reason to keep building.

If you're curious, Freebird AI is a free extension for VS Code. (https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=TenLabs.freebird-ai)

The VS Code Marketplace Funnel Is Broken. Here's What 443 Acquisitions in 15 Days Taught Me

Adilaw12 — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 11:40:00 +0000

443 acquisitions. 110 installs. 15 days.
I launched Freebird AI on June 13. Two weeks later, I was staring at telemetry that didn't add up, until it did.

The word "acquisition" doesn't mean what you think
On the VS Code Marketplace, an acquisition is a click into your listing. Not an install.
Here's my actual funnel for the first 15 days:

92% of people who viewed the listing clicked in, and 24.8% of those installed.
Both numbers are strong. So why was I concerned?
Because only 481 people ever found the listing in 15 days.
The product wasn't the bottleneck. Discovery was.

The Marketplace doesn't surface new extensions
Here's what my publisher dashboard looked like:

During this same period, Freebird had:

29–45 daily active users
4,000+ commands executed per day
High activation rate and strong retention

The algorithm didn't care. New extensions are effectively invisible until you drive your own traffic. The Marketplace search is dominated by extensions with thousands of installs and years of reviews. If you launch quietly, you stay quiet.

The install vs. .vsix download split reveals a hidden channel
Look closely at the bar chart in the dashboard screenshot. There are two colours:

Purple - Install from VS Code (individual developers)
Blue - Download .vsix (offline installs)

The blue bars are disproportionately tall.
That tells me a different kind of user is finding this extension: enterprise teams, IT-managed machines, internal tooling pipelines, corporate firewalled environments. They can't install extensions directly from the Marketplace, so they download the .vsix and deploy it manually.
This is a distribution channel almost nobody talks about when building dev tools. And it's a signal worth watching: a high .vsix download rate means you have enterprise adoption you're not actively courting.

What the funnel tells you to fix
Strong conversion + low page views = a traffic problem, not a product problem.
That's actually good news. It means the listing works. The pitch works. The extension works. The only thing broken is how many people see it.
Here's my next 30 days of distribution work:

Listing optimisation
Better keyword tags for Marketplace search ranking
GIFs showing the core AI workflow
Before/after screenshots

Community distribution
r/vscode, r/programming, r/webdev
Dev.to posts like this one
Show HN

Milestone launches
Product Hunt (timed to a feature drop)

None of this requires changing the product. It requires showing the product to more people.

The real lesson
Most VS Code extensions don't fail because they're bad. They fail because the Marketplace algorithm doesn't know they exist, and neither does anyone else.
Instrument your funnel. Page views → acquisitions → installs → DAU → command volume. Each ratio tells you exactly which lever to pull next.
If your conversion is strong, you don't need a better product. You need better distribution.

Built this while analysing data for Freebird AI - an AI coding assistant for VS Code with Gemini 2.5 Flash as the default backend, 20 free edits/day, no setup required.
What's your install conversion rate? Drop it in the comments, curious how this compares across extension categories.

HN comment converted 90% of viewers into installs. No launch post. Here's why that worked, why it broke, and what it means if you're building dev tools

Adilaw12 — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 04:08:40 +0000

I am Adi, a founder based in Melbourne, Australia. This is the honest story of launching Freebird AI.

Two weeks ago, I dropped a comment in a Hacker News thread about what I was building. Not a launch post. Not a Show HN. Just a few sentences in a monthly "What are you working on?" thread.
By the next morning, I had users in Paris, Mumbai, Frankfurt, Seoul, Singapore and Cape Town.

Here's what happened, what broke, and what I learned.

The numbers (14 days, zero paid marketing)

444 page views
403 acquisitions,106 active installs
90.77% page-to-install conversion rate
10 countries and 12 cities with active users
$0 in advertising

That conversion rate surprised me. It means the people who find the listing almost always install it. Discovery is the bottleneck - not the product.

But the install number hides something important: most of those users hit errors on their very first message. More on that shortly.

Why I built it
I'm an architect and researcher by training, and I lecture in construction at a University in Melbourne, Australia.
A few years ago, I started writing code seriously. And like every developer in 2024, I started relying on AI coding assistants.
The problem was Copilot. It's genuinely good - until you hit your monthly high-speed limit and suddenly you're on a degraded model that can barely keep up with a simple refactor. Cursor was the obvious alternative, but at $20/month as an additional cost, it felt steep, and it required migrating my entire workflow.
So I built the thing I actually wanted: an AI coding assistant that works the second you install it, gives you 20 free advanced edits every day via Gemini Flash, and never blocks you.

That's Freebird AI.

The first spike — and why the product was broken
The HN comment drove a real spike. The VS Code Marketplace showed downloads climbing from Paris, Mumbai, Seoul, and Cape Town - all organic, all within 24 hours.
Then I looked at the telemetry.
I'd built anonymous event tracking from day one — no PII, just counts. Extension activated, message sent, api error. Here's what the first few days showed:

Jun 19: extension_activated: 4, api_error: 3, message_sent: 3
Jun 20: extension_activated: 5, api_error: 6, message_sent: 7
Jun 21: extension_activated: 20, api_error: 5, message_sent: 5

Every single day, api_error was nearly 1:1 with message_sent. Users were hitting errors on almost every interaction.
The root cause: I had set Ollama as the default backend, with an auto-install routine that was supposed to download and install Ollama silently on first run. On paper, clever. In practice, it failed on almost every machine - blocked by macOS Gatekeeper, Windows UAC, and corporate firewalls. The silent failure just threw an api_error with no useful message.

Users in Seoul and Mumbai installed Freebird, tried to use it, got an error, and uninstalled. I didn't know until I looked at the data.

The Stripe problem nobody told me about
Someone in Paris was clicking the upgrade button every single day for three days. Never converted.
When I finally checked Stripe, I found the reason: the payment link was showing A$9 instead of $6 USD.
The currency mismatch was stopping people at the last step. A US or European developer seeing "A$9" when they expected "$6" closes the tab. I would never have known without looking at Stripe directly.

Pricing friction kills conversion silently.

The fix sprint
I spent a day fixing everything:
Changed the default backend from Ollama to Gemini Flash - new installs now work immediately with zero setup
Built a proper fallback chain - Gemini Flash → local Ollama → Gemini fallback endpoint
Fixed Stripe - new $6 USD payment link, updated all references
Upgraded Gemini from free to paid tier (rate limits were hitting with concurrent global users)
Fixed a deprecated model name - Google silently deprecated gemini-2.0-flash mid-session. Users burned through their entire daily quota, hitting 502 errors before I caught it 40 minutes later. This is what convinced me to set up UptimeRobot monitoring.
Built a quota wall — instead of a generic error when free edits run out, users now see a proper upgrade prompt with their session stats and a personal message from me
After the fixes:

Jun 24: extension_activated: 33, message_sent: 4, cloud_edit_used: 4, api_error: 0

Zero api_errors. First clean day since launch.

What the conversion funnel actually looks like
Here's what surprised me most when I dug into the data:
81.93% page-to-install is strong. It means the README and listing are doing their job.
But only 4 messages sent across 33 sessions is a problem. That's a 12% activation rate - meaning 88% of users who install the extension don't send a single message.
This is the blank canvas problem. Users open the extension, see an empty chat input, don't know what to type, and close it.
My fix: clickable suggested prompts on the welcome screen.

🔍 Explain this file and suggest improvements
🐛 Find bugs or potential issues in my code
✨ Refactor this code to be cleaner
🧪 Write tests for the current file

One click sends the prompt. Removes all friction from the first interaction. I'm watching the telemetry to see if `message_sent` climbs.

The most important insight
Power users will find you before you find them.
Mumbai, Paris, Cape Town - these users found Freebird organically, used it heavily enough to exhaust their 20-edit free quota multiple times in a single day, and kept coming back. I didn't market to them. I didn't even know they existed until I looked at the Vercel logs.
One Mumbai user sent over 40 messages in a single sitting across two quota resets.
These are your early evangelists. When someone uses your product that intensively, don't just reset their quota - talk to them. I added a personal founder message to the quota wall for users who hit 15+ edits:

"You're a serious Freebird user ⚡ — I'm Adi, the founder. Email me for a free 30-day Pro key."

That message costs nothing and creates a direct line to your most engaged users.

What I'd tell anyone building a VS Code extension
Ship early, but monitor from day one. I had users before I had proper monitoring. If I'd checked telemetry on day 2, I would have caught the api_error spike immediately.
The default experience is everything. Making Ollama the default made sense to me as a developer. But "install this 4GB model first" is not a first-run experience for most users. Cloud-first with a local fallback is the right default.
One HN comment can drive real traction. A genuine, specific description of what you're building, in the right thread, can reach thousands of developers actively looking for solutions. The >"What are you working on?" monthly thread is one of the most underrated distribution channels for developer tools.
Pricing friction kills conversion silently. The Paris user who clicked upgrade three days in a row and never converted wasn't price-sensitive. They wanted to pay. The A$9 vs $6 USD mismatch was stopping them at checkout.

Conversion rate tells you about product-market fit. Page views tell you about distribution. My 81.93% conversion rate is a strong signal. My 404 page views in two weeks are a weak signal. Discovery is the problem to solve next.

What's next
I'm planning a Show HN post for July 1 and a Product Hunt launch for mid-July.
But the thing I'm most excited about is a domain-specific version for architects, BIM developers, and computational designers. General AI assistants handle the Revit API, IFC schemas, and Grasshopper data trees terribly - they hallucinate method names and get relationship traversal wrong.

I have an unfair advantage here: I'm an architect who has used these tools professionally. That's a longer post for another day.

Try it
If you're tired of Copilot throttling or Cursor's price, give Freebird a try. It works immediately, no setup required.
→ Install free from the VS Code Marketplace
→ GitHub (MIT)

Happy to answer questions in the comments - especially from anyone who's built VS Code extensions or shipped developer tools independently.

Tags: #vscode #ai #opensource #devtools #buildinpublic #showdev #typescript #javascript