Setting Up Windsurf in 2026: It's Now Called Devin Desktop, and Pro Just Got 33% More Expensive

Disclosure: DevTools Review has no confirmed affiliate/commission relationship with Windsurf — affiliateStatus: none in our own data layer, because Cognition hasn't published a publisher programme since the rebrand. We earn nothing from the links below.

According to DevTools Review's hands-on testing across 11 AI coding tools, two things trip people up when they go looking for Windsurf right now. First, windsurf.com permanently redirects to devin.ai/desktop — Cognition rebranded the editor to Devin Desktop after acquiring Codeium, and the old name only survives because it's still what people search for. Second, if you've seen Pro priced at $15/month anywhere (including, until this pass, one of our own pages), that's stale: it's $20/month now, which puts it exactly level with Cursor Pro instead of undercutting it. Here's the setup walkthrough with both of those corrected.

Installing it

Go to devin.ai/desktop (not the old windsurf.com URL if you can avoid the redirect hop) and grab the installer for your OS. It's a VS Code fork, so the experience is familiar — Apple Silicon runs natively with no Rosetta, Linux ships as a .deb or .AppImage, and installation is under a minute on most machines. First launch offers to import your VS Code extensions, theme, keybindings, settings and snippets in one step — do this before you touch any settings manually, since importing later requires VS Code to be fully closed to avoid file-lock issues.

The plans, correctly priced

• Free — 25 credits/month, roughly 5 Cascade actions/day. Enough to evaluate the product, not to live in it.
• Pro — $20/month (up from $15; this is the number that's actually current as of this pricing cycle) — unlimited completions, a real Cascade credit pool, premium models.
• Teams — $40/user/month + $80/month base — Pro plus SSO, admin dashboard, usage analytics.

At $20/month, Pro no longer undercuts Cursor — it matches it. The free tier is still the most generous in the category, so start there before deciding Cascade is worth the upgrade.

Cascade is the actual reason to use this

Everything else — Supercomplete autocomplete, the Command Palette, keybinding presets — is table stakes you'd expect from any VS Code fork. Cascade (Cmd/Ctrl+L) is the feature that's actually differentiated: it reads relevant files across your project, plans the change, executes it with a diff you approve per file, and if something breaks it reads the terminal output and iterates. Chat mode does the same without touching files, for when you want an explanation rather than an edit.

Two project-level files worth creating on day one:

• .windsurfignore — exclude node_modules, dist, build, .git and friends from indexing. Speeds indexing up and cuts noise from suggestions.
• .windsurfrules — standing instructions Cascade reads at the start of every flow (stack, conventions, testing setup). This is the single highest-leverage five minutes you'll spend setting it up.

Where it breaks

Cascade timing out or not responding is almost always one of two things: no internet connectivity (Cascade is cloud-dependent, unlike autocomplete-only tools), or exhausted free-tier flow credits for the month — check Settings > Subscription before assuming it's broken. Extensions that lean on Microsoft-proprietary APIs (Live Share is the common one) won't work even though Windsurf supports the Open VSX registry for most others.

Full setup guide, troubleshooting table, and the corrected pricing breakdown: https://devtoolsreview.com/tutorials/setup-windsurf/