I Replaced Cursor, Copilot, and Windsurf with a $0 Local Stack — 60 Days Later I'm Not Going Back

#ai #opensource #coding #tips

Sixty days ago I cancelled three subscriptions in one afternoon: Cursor ($20/mo), GitHub Copilot ($10/mo), and Windsurf ($15/mo). That's $540/year. I replaced them with a fully local AI coding stack and honestly expected to crawl back within two weeks.

I didn't. Here's the exact setup and the honest numbers.

The free stack

Tool	Role	Replaces	Cost
Ollama + Qwen2.5-Coder 7B	Local model	Copilot completions	$0
Continue.dev	VS Code extension	Cursor chat	$0
Tabby	Self-hosted completion server	Copilot	$0
MonkeyCode	Agentic coding workflows	Cursor Composer	$0

Total: $0/month vs $45/month.

The 60-day scoreboard

Metric	Paid tools	Free stack
Inline completion latency	~300ms	~180ms (local, no network)
Chat quality on refactors	8/10	6/10
Works on a plane	No	Yes
Sends my code to the cloud	Yes	No
Monthly bill	$45	$0

Setup (20 minutes)

# 1. Ollama + model
curl -fsSL https://ollama.com/install.sh | sh
ollama pull qwen2.5-coder:7b   # 4.7GB, runs on 8GB RAM

# 2. Continue.dev — install from VS Code marketplace, then:

// ~/.continue/config.json
{
  "models": [{
    "title": "Qwen Local",
    "provider": "ollama",
    "model": "qwen2.5-coder:7b"
  }],
  "tabAutocompleteModel": {
    "title": "Qwen Autocomplete",
    "provider": "ollama",
    "model": "qwen2.5-coder:1.5b"
  }
}

The controversial part

The paid tools are better. Cursor's multi-file edits are genuinely 30% smarter. But here's the thing nobody admits: 90% of my AI usage is autocomplete and "explain this function" — and the free tools do that at 95% of the quality for 0% of the price.

The last 10% isn't worth $540/year. It's worth maybe $50.

The honest downsides

7B models hallucinate imports more than GPT-4-class models. Fix: paste the error back, it self-corrects.
First token latency spikes if the model is cold. Fix: ollama run qwen2.5-coder:7b --keep-alive 24h.
No fancy "apply to 12 files" button. I use MonkeyCode for multi-file agent tasks instead — it's open source and does the job.

If you want to try the agentic side of this stack, I put my MonkeyCode setup notes here: https://ly.cyberserval.tech/iIETXiF

What's your breaking point — what feature would make you pay $20/month again, or have you already gone full local?

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