Cursor's tab-completion is magic until you see the API bill. Per-token pricing for frontier models adds up fast when an agent is chewing through your whole repo. I wanted the same models in my editor without the meter running — so I built Toolxz Bridge: a free, open-source local proxy that routes AI into Cursor, VS Code, and Claude Desktop.
Here's the setup and the honest trade-offs.
What the Bridge actually does
It's a local reverse proxy that runs entirely on your machine (127.0.0.1). You sign in to the AI services you already use — your own accounts — and the Bridge exposes those sessions as standard OpenAI (/v1/chat/completions) and Anthropic (/v1/messages) endpoints. Your IDE talks to localhost, the Bridge translates, and the models answer.
No middleman subscription. No per-token markup. The key point: it routes your own authenticated sessions — it's infrastructure, not a free-models giveaway.
Setting it up in Cursor (2 minutes)
- Start the Bridge locally (it listens on port 8000)
- Open Cursor Settings → Models
- Toggle OpenAI API Key, set the Base URL to
http://localhost:8000/v1 - Add a custom model name like
gitlab/claude-opus-5 - Chat and Cmd+K now run through your own sessions
Same trick works in VS Code (Continue / Cline extensions) and Claude Desktop — anything that accepts an OpenAI- or Anthropic-compatible endpoint.
Which models can you route?
Through GitLab Duo sessions: Claude Opus 5, Claude Sonnet 5, Claude Fable 5.1. Plus Google AI Studio (Gemini 3.8 Flash with a 2M-token context window), AWS Kiro Studio (Claude 3.7 Sonnet), and Qwen 2.5 Coder 32B. A Chrome-124 TLS engine keeps browser-grade session compatibility so logins don't break.
The privacy story (this matters)
Everything is local. Session cookies and tokens live in a machine-locked AES-256 encrypted vault on your computer. Zero cloud telemetry — your code never leaves your machine through us. If you're the kind of person who reads privacy policies, this is the architecture you want.
Honest limitations
- You bring your own accounts — the Bridge doesn't create access you don't have
- It's a local tool, so it runs where you run it (no hosted magic)
- Session-based routing can break when providers change their web logins — the TLS engine handles most of it, but it's inherently less stable than a first-party API key
For agent-heavy Cursor sessions on repos, though, the economics are hard to argue with.
Try it
Free and open-source: toolxz.com/bridge
And if you want frontier models with zero setup at all, our AI Chat runs them right in the browser — no signup, no API key. I wrote about using it for coding help here.
Founder of Toolxz (toolxz.com) — 45+ free browser-based tools. I write about practical AI tooling and developer workflows.
Top comments (0)